[IAEP] [sugar] Sugar on Edubuntu

[Jonas Smedegaard]

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On Wed, Nov 05, 2008 at 04:38:19PM -0800, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>
>On 05.11.2008, at 13:55, David Farning wrote:
>
>> .One sticking point was the availability of squeak on Ubuntu.  If I  
>> remember this issue was beaten to death before I got involved with SL.
>
>I only remember discussion of getting it into Debian, not Ubuntu.  

Sigh. Yes, it is sometimes frustration to work on a brilliant 
distribution that is so frequently missing from the radar of others. :-(


>Basically, even though the license issues are finally resolved, they  
>did not want to have it in because they do not agree with its current  
>development model:
>
>http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-June/015479.html

Here is the contents of /usr/share/doc/etoys/README.non-free on Debian:


Why is EToys in non-free?
=========================

  
EToys was rejected from inclusion in the Debian main archive, because 
the ftpmasters don't consider the sources as source. ;) Since we 
unsuccessfully tried to convince them that EToys belongs into main 
already and the time until Lenny will be frozen is short, I decided to 
upload it to non-free, for the benefit of the users (so they can simply 
use apt-get to install etoys, provided they have non-free in their 
sources), even though we believe it satisfies all the requirements of 
the DFSG [1] and policy [2].  For Lenny+1 we plan to convince the 
ftpmasters to accept it in main.


Let me explain the source situation:
  
EToys comes as an "image", a snapshot of all objects, which is loaded 
into a squeakvm, modified in memory, and snapshotted to an image file 
again. This image cannot easily be rebuilt from pure source code, but 
the snapshots do contain all the source code. The image is the 
"preferred form of modification" for the EToys developer community, this 
is how they work [3].
  
The Etoys image is derived from a Squeak image which is derived from a 
Smalltalk image back to 1976, when the actual bootstrapping happened. 
This is in contrast to how some Lisps work, they do a lengthy bootstrap 
from source and then do a memory snapshot so they can skip the 
initialization at startup time. To modify that snapshot, one changes the 
code and rebuilds the snapshot. But in Smalltalk, to modify the snapshot 
all the source code tools "patch" live object memory directly. So we 
think this kind of source form is enough to satisfy the DFSG.
  
Squeak source code in text form can be seen, shared and modified from 
within the squeakvm. That's what everybody does with Squeak source code. 
The changes are then either available as "change sets" or as 
"Monticello" packages (a version control system for Smalltalk code, see 
[4]), and can be distributed separatly or used to create derived 
versions of the modified blobs. But while this works for small changes, 
this isn't practical to rebuild a complete image.
  

  [1] http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
  [2] file:///usr/share/doc/debian-policy/policy.html
  [3] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-May/128753.html
  [4] http://www.wiresong.ca/Monticello/


Holger Levsen, 2008-06-13



Kind regards,

  - Jonas


- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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