Re: super-sablevm source package - an idea

On Oct 19, 2004, at 1:10 AM, Grzegorz B. Prokopski wrote:

>
> It took some time for this idea to mature (also thanks to discussions
> with Etienne) but I think it's time to think about it seriously.
>
> The goal would be to:
> 1) allow an average user to install and use SableVM easily, directly
> from sources,
> 2) ensure that user gets everything he might need to use SableVM in
> his Java environment in a powerful manner.
>
> ad 1) We would like to get rid of common hassles a user has to fight
> with, like installation (or what's worse compilation from gcc sources)
> of libffi and maybe some other, less-comonly used libraries.
>
> ad 2) SableVM is "only a JVM" so alone it's not very useful by itself.
> When *I* want to use SableVM in fact I also need a few other things 
> that
> might or might not come with my operating system.  Also in case of
> non-debian distributions these "other things" are not always available
> and even if they are - they're rarely configured to seemlessly work 
> with
> SableVM.
>

I think this is a great idea. When I first started with sablevm (for 
Mac OS X) there were several pieces missing and it did take some time 
to  find them all and get them configured correctly and built. 
Especially libffi, which does not work out-of-the-box for OS X.

The "extras" package will probably change rather infrequently so it 
would probably be easier to have one package for these extras, and one 
for sablevm+classpath. For the first time, you need both but after that 
you would normally only need the sablevm+classpath package.

It might also be useful to consider what packages an end-user needs for 
an execution environment, and what additional items are needed for 
development/testing, and arrange the packages along these lines. 
Something like "base" and "tools".

Regards.....Peter