Subject: [bug#36033] Add Smalltalk Pharo VM

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 01 Jun 2019 15:23:02 +0200

Hello,

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

Some preliminary comments:

Brian Woodcox <[email-masked]> skribis:

> From 49683e04e51cd904571008fa7979a3f58ae0134c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: "Brian C. Woodcox" <[email-masked]>
> 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?

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

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

> +    (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.  :-)

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.)

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.)

Thank you,
Ludo’.