[plt-dev] [Fwd: [plt-scheme] How should PLTCOLLECTS work?]

On Mar  6, Jon Rafkind wrote:
> This problem as struck me in the past. What do other think of
> drscheme printing a warning if it can't find its own libraries at
> startup time? I think this can be done in the shell/batch script. If
> it can't find drscheme/drscheme.ss then it could issue a warning
> that potentially PLTCOLLECTS is incorrect.

Doing that in the shell will be a nightmare.  Actually, the best way I
can think of "doing it in the shell" is by capturing stderr output and
changing the error if it looks like the usual complaint.  (And this is
a bad idea.)

A slightly better (but still pretty bad, IMO) solution is to add a
mzscheme flag that says something like "load srscheme/drscheme.ss, and
if you can't find it, then say something about PLTCOLLECTS".  This is
bad IMO for the reason we talked about yesterday: such a flag is
roughly telling mzscheme to read your mind and guess what caused the
error.


> It would be nice to do this for mzscheme as well but I don't know of a 
> clean way to do it.

Why not take my explanation and add it in the docs?  If it appears in
the same place that PLTCOLLECTS is mentioned, then there shouldn't be
any problem since people will see it.  (Perhaps in a new page, which
will be linked from the PLTCOLLECTS entry, describing the different
uses it can have, and warning about the potential mess you can get
yourself into.)

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