Re: [Factor-talk] Boot images (was Re: 0.86?)

[Slava P. <sl...@fa...>]

On 26-Oct-06, at 8:02 PM, Derek Peschel wrote:

> Daniel, Slava, or anyone else:
>
> Can you build a boot image without having a working boot image?

The latest boot images (for current darcs code) are available for  
download from http://factorcode.org/images/latest/. This is linked to  
from the factorcode.org web site.

If you have a working factor.image, you can also start it and do

USE: image
"ppc" make-image  ! or x86, pentium4, amd64

However this does not always work if a large change has occurred  
between your factor.image and the latest code. When such an event  
occurs, I upload new images to the above URL (and I upload new images  
regardless). This is becoming less of an issue over time, as the  
image generation code improves and language semantics stabilize.

If all else fails, you can always e-mail me or ping me on IRC for  
latest boot images.

I think this works well, the only downside is that you cannot pull a  
random revision out of darcs and expect to get it working; only the  
released versions and the latest code have boot images.

>   Is that
> documented anywhere?

Yes, although it may not be obvious: in the "Development tools"  
section of the handbook, http://factorcode.org/responder/help/show- 
help?topic=images. As you're aware documentation is still a work in  
progress, and help search is not as useful as it could be.

>   Is it easy to tell what boot images will work with
> what versions of the VM or Factor source?

Unfortunately, not.

> Regression testing -- either frequent as part of accepting changes  
> to the
> repository, or infrequent as part of keeping a few stable snapshots  
> on the
> Web server -- might make my life easier.  I have mentioned a few other
> things that might.  Documentation that I can use to investigate  
> problems
> myself might also help (I'm still pretty clueless about making use  
> of the
> debugger crash dumps or the low-level debugger).

If you ever find yourself in the low level debugger, let me know and  
I'll try to track it down.

Slava