[plt-dev] component delivery, a social experiment

I frequently check for new prereleased PLT Scheme Full and allways download the most recent version (in windows xp) Two weeks 
without a newer release is longer than normal, but in the past it frequently occurred that the most recent release was a week old or 
so I was not worried. I hope downloading prerelease PLT Scheme Full will remain as easy as it is now.
Jos

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Matthias Felleisen" <matthias at ccs.neu.edu>
To: "PLT Developers" <plt-dev at list.cs.brown.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2009 6:20 PM
Subject: [plt-dev] component delivery, a social experiment


>
> Ladies and gentlemen,
>
> Eli spent my first hour++ in my office this morning pointing our  serious flaws in our world. Here are two important points, and I 
> am  putting them up for discussion here with a request for sensible  comments:
>
> 1. In some way we have been conducting a social experiment for the  past 10 days or so. As you all know, Eli spent a considerable 
> time  creating the nightly build framework when he first arrived here. From  the nightly build, Eli's software also creates a 
> nightly set of  deliveries and puts them up on the web somewhere. What you ma not  realize is that the nightly builds have been 
> broken for some 10 days  due to the check-in of a module that breaks the component delivery  mechanism.
>
> Nobody complained, so our conclusion was that nobody noticed. Our  second corollary was that perhaps we only have a camel-back 
> distribution of users: those who use svn and build from svn and those  that use only the releases. (As Eli walked out of my 
> office, I  switched to my email and the first message contained a complaint about  the missing nightly deliveries. This means we 
> know of one user of the  deliveries.)
>
> 2. Which brings me to the topic of "delivery by component." Apparently  few, if anyone here, is aware of Eli's carefully arrange 
> delivery  layers:
>
>  -- smallest: plain mzscheme, no mred, no docs
>  -- mid size: mred, drscheme, no docs
>  -- largest:  everything
>
> Eli tells me that there are numerous people who use 'smallest'; I  don't know about mid.
>
> He (and I and I know Robby) have for a long time envisioned a delivery  system that starts with a core package and then asks 
> (possibly via  some gui) what other packages should be installed, e.g., the 'mred'  layer or the server. The three-tier delivery 
> system is a first step  toward this component-oriented delivery.
>
> Eli has carefully maintained a dependency graph and list (that takes  some 11megs) among the various files (8 platforms, 3 tiers, 
> everything  spelled out). Since people aren't really aware of this system, they  easily and apparently relatively often break the 
> non-cyclic  dependencies. (I am guilty of doing this myself when I wrote the first  docs that depended on slideshow.)
>
> In my opinion, we have two options:
>
>  -- drop the dependency system and just deliver one large package
>  -- enforce the dependencies. If you break them, you get a message.
>     If you don't clean them up in N hours, the file is removed.
>
> ;; ---
>
> As I said, sensible comments welcome. -- Matthias
>
>
>
>
> _________________________________________________
>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-dev
>