On Jun 1, 2019, at 7:23 AM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

Hello,

Thanks for working on this, and congrats on your first package, which is
not an easy one! :-)

Some preliminary comments:

Brian Woodcox <bw@inskydata.com> skribis:

From 49683e04e51cd904571008fa7979a3f58ae0134c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: "Brian C. Woodcox" <bw@InSkyData.com>
Date: Fri, 31 May 2019 13:14:54 -0600
Subject: [PATCH] Add pharo-vm package

[...]

+(define %url "https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm.git")

My understanding (but I’m no expert) is that this is a VM that can run
Pharo bytecode, but it’s not “the” Pharo VM. Is it correct?

More info —> https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/UpdatedPharoByExample/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/book-result/PharoTour/PharoTour.html

“1. The virtual machine (VM) is the only component that is different for each operating system. The VM is the execution engine (similar to a JVM). It takes Pharo bytcode that is generated each time user compiles a piece of code, converts it to machine code and executes it. Pharo comes with the Cog VM a very fast JITing VM. The VM executable is named:”

+(define-public pharo-vm
+ (package
+ (name "pharo-vm")

Consequently, it looks like this should be called ‘opensmalltalk-vm’,
no?

Not exactly —> https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm

So this is to distinguish the one we are packaging.

+    (arguments
+     `(#:tests? #f ;; no tests available

Or maybe there’s a special command to run them?

+               ;; add symlinks
+               (symlink (string-append (assoc-ref %build-inputs "libgit2") "/lib/libgit2.so")
+                        (string-append out "/lib/pharo/" pharo-version "/libgit2.so"))
+               (symlink (string-append (assoc-ref %build-inputs "libssh2") "/lib/libssh2.so")
+                        (string-append out "/lib/pharo/" pharo-version "/libssh2.so"))
+               (symlink (string-append (assoc-ref %build-inputs "openssl") "/lib/libssl.so")
+                        (string-append out "/lib/pharo/" pharo-version "/libssl.so"))
+               (symlink (string-append (assoc-ref %build-inputs "freetype")"/lib/libfreetype.so.6")
+                        (string-append out "/lib/pharo/" pharo-version "/libfreetype.so.6")))

Those symlinks look somewhat inelegant to me. :-)

Me too, unfortunately, Pharo won’t run without (most of) these. I didn’t dig deep enough in the code, but if they made some changes, I am pretty sure the symlinks could be done away with. I found in some cases that pharo found a couple of libraries in the store during the build process.

My hope is that other Pharo users might use Pharo in Guix and maybe this issue can be resolved over time.

Could we instead arrange so that the VM searches for those files in
their right place? Often that involves substituting things like
“libfoo.so” in the code with the corresponding absolute file name (see
for example how this is done for Racket.)

Possibly, I would have to look into it when I have some time.

Last question: does this Git checkout contain binaries, such as
Smalltalk images? IOW, is this being built entirely from source, or is
it bootstrap from opaque binaries? (I know that Pharo itself is or used
to be bootstrap from very old Smalltalk images and that work was ongoing
to get rid of them and have a nicer bootstrapping story.)

Everything in this vm is being built from source.