The squeak-vm package ships with a single executable in PATH,
/usr/bin/squeak. This script is completely different from the upstream
squeak script and breaks existing applications, e.g. the Etoys Sugar
activity:

=== Begin ===
squeak -encoding UTF-8 -vm-display-x11 -xshm -sugarBundleId org.vpri.EtoysActivity -sugarActivityId 79c094fe2dfe03117da48525b3193432bc970507 /home/sascha.silbe/sugar-jhbuild/install/share/etoys/etoys.image  BUNDLE_PATH /home/sascha.silbe/sugar-jhbuild/install/share/sugar/activities/Etoys.activity SQUEAKLETS /home/sascha.silbe/.sugar/default/org.vpri.EtoysActivity/instance BUNDLE_ID org.vpri.EtoysActivity ACTIVITY_ID 79c094fe2dfe03117da48525b3193432bc970507
found gettext in path
/home/sascha.silbe/sugar-jhbuild/install/share/sugar/activities/Etoys.activity
Could not open the Squeak image file `-encoding'.
=== End ===

Because this script is the only executable in PATH, there's not even a
way to work around this (hence severity important).

Please install the upstream squeak script to allow applications using the
squeak VM to run. If you prefer to keep the existing script, how about
renaming it to "squeak-user", "squeak-easy", "squeak-simple" or
something like that?


[1] https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Etoys

The problem exists exactly as originally described. It is getting worse in
the sense that the Debian etoys package is now seriously out of date (see
#636577), and therefore it’s natural to install it from source, only that
doesn’t work, as it expects to call the normal squeak script.

The natural workaround is to deinstall Debian’s squeak-vm and install that
from upstream too, which is a pity.