[plt-dev] component delivery, a social experiment

I personally don't see any value in leaving out the docs or DrScheme.
Everything is so small anyways and hard drive space is cheap... I
don't get the use case.

Jay

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 8:25 AM, Matthias Felleisen
<matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> Thanks for the responses. The responses propose three natural things:
>
> 1. We need the nightly builds.
>
> 2. Eli's component rules must be turned into something that people can read
> up on.
>
> 3. The email about rule violations should not go to Eli but to plt-dev.
> (It's all implemented, no need to shift it anywhere.)
>
> ;; ---
>
> There were no comments on component-oriented distribution.
>
> -- Matthias
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Nov 10, 2009, at 12:20 PM, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
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-- 
Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
http://teammccarthy.org/jay

"The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93