Hello,
I am writing this email to ask for opinions and discuss some issues
of the SmallTalk packages that we have in the tree.
We currently have the following smalltalk implementations in the tree (STI):
dev-lang/gnu-smalltalk
dev-lang/smalltalkx
dev-lang/squeak
dev-lang/squeak-basicimage
dev-lang/squeak-fullimage
Let's consider the following points about the STI's before we go on:
1 - They are usually written in smalltalk itself (e.g squeak).
2 - STI's don't make a clear distinction between the programming language,
the IDE and even the installer of the implementation.
3 - STI's have their own configuration scripts
(dialog-based sometimes) to customize and compile (from point 2 also).
Because of these reasons, and probably others i forget at the moment,
vendors usually
release the STI's in binary form, with all the standard classes compiled
by default,
only making a compilation necessary if the user needs a very specific
feature _and_
which is usually enabled through special scripts/options/magic/vodoo and
that aren't really something
easy to tweak with our ebuilds.
Now, for a brief report of these packages in our tree:
dev-lang/squeak-*: compiles/installs fine so far. Though
it isn't the latest stable release, who takes care of this package
anyway?, i heard someone was proposing to remove it from the tree actually.
(yes, kind of hard to mantain)
dev-lang/gnu-smalltalk: compiles *fine* , though
we need to patch it with kind of an ugly hack to
allow re-installations of the implementation.
dev-lang/smalltalkx: this package is _horribly_
outdated, plus, it doesn't compile fine here,
(does it work for anyone else out there?).
Of all of these packages, i think gnu-smalltalk is the only one who could
survive in the tree (As long as we apply ugly patches).
The main reason of this email is that I am trying to keep alive some of
these
implementations in the tree, updating smalltalkx to the new 5.6 version,
_BUT_ , installing the version in binary form instead, since apparently
can't be compiled
with <= glibc2.2.
The binary version works fine here (using glibc2.3.x/gcc3), anyone
interested can test the ebuild
http://dev.gentoo.org/~araujo/stuff/ebuilds/smalltalkx-5.2.6.ebuild ,
and fetch the binaries from http://dev.gentoo.org/~araujo/stuff/bin/ .
Please test it and send me feedbacks, to this list or my email if you
are interested
to address these issues, if not, well.. i think we'll end up removing
these packages,
and though ST is dying, it is the only TRUE OO language ;-)
Cheers,
--
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