[racket-dev] proposal: `data' collection

[Sorry for the late reply.]


On Jun 30, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> Which part is a symptom? My request for a description when there's
> no owner?
> 
> The no-owner fact? 
> 
> The unstable collects? 

"All of the above."

Here are some questions that can demonstrate the problem better:

1. What text would you expect to find in the "purpose.txt" file of
   `unstable'?  Of `data'?

2. My course code is installed in a local collection named `pl'.  Why
   would I need to rename it if a new `pl' module was added to the
   racket distribution?

3. Say that you want to install apache on your machine.  What would
   you think if your OS tells you that you need to install powerpoint
   for that?

4. Assuming that there is a `data' collection with a few known data
   structures implemented, what happens when there's another data
   structure that happens to be just the thing for some project X
   and otherwise it's not too useful, or at least it seems that way.
   Why can't project X come with a new data/foo module?

In any case, keep in mind that there is another way to make me stop
saying "coherent" and "package" -- give up the idea of ever getting a
smaller racket distribution, and the problem is solved.  We won't even
need the distribution specs, since everything will be included...
(From my POV, this would work out great since it looks like the
general attitude towards it is that it's just something that *I*
choose to be concerned with, and otherwise there's no problems.)

For reference, here's a table of installer sizes (the Windows one,
which has the highest compression) and source bundle size (the unix
one, which has the highest compression in the sources bundles), with
roughly one representative per year:

                 bin   src
      ver  year  size  size
      ---  ----  ----  ----
       53  1998  2.6M
      103  2000  3.4M  4.6M
      200  2001  4.3M  6.7M
      203  2002  4.8M  6.0M
      205  2003  5.8M  7.6M
      209  2004  8.4M  11M
      300  2005  12M   13M
      372  2007  14M   15M
      4.0  2008  22M   14M
      4.2  2009  25M   15M
      5.0  2010  28M   16M

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!