[oi-dev] proposal for new squeak package

[stes at telenet.be]

Although there is already an IPS squeak package in OpenIndiana, I'm considering to submit a PR for a new squeak package (or a set of new squeak packages).

The squeak project uses "subversion" (svn) to manage the C source code.

A large part of that C source code is automatically generated from Smalltalk using "Slang".  Slang is Smalltalk code that can be transpiled into other source code like C (or Javascript).

The current IPS squeak package uses the 'prep-svn.mk' from:

https://github.com/OpenIndiana/oi-userland/blob/oi/hipster/make-rules/prep-svn.mk

I think a solution could be to submit an (almost identical) new set of packages which differ only in the way they would retrieve source code.

The new set of packages would retrieve source code from github.com instead of from the subversion server for squeak, so the new packages would not use prep-svn.mk to fetch the C source code to build the packages.

Using IPS mediators (there is an IPS mediator squeak) the implementation could then be set (choosen) using 'pkg set-mediator'.

This is already done for the moment to choose between squeak or opensmalltalk VMs.

The squeak project continues to use subversion, so I'd prefer not to change the existing squeak package as long as the squeak subversion server exists ...

On the other hand, the metadata for IPS (the OpenIndiana repository catalog) will grow as additional squeak packages would be added.

>From my point of view, I'd prefer to have two set of squeak packages (one set built from subversion), the other set from github, so I do not mind the IPS metadata issue (the size of the OpenIndiana metadata catalogs), but before submitting the pull request for the new packages, what is the opinion please of OpenIndiana maintainers/developers ?

Regards,
David Stes