[plt-dev] component delivery, a social experiment

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 11:57 AM, Jay McCarthy <jay.mccarthy at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I believe that there are people who want to install the text interface
on systems where GUI libraries are not available.  But beyond that, I
don't see a point.  However, before we make this hard, we might want
to talk to the people who package PLT for Fedora/Debian/etc.

sam th

>
> 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _________________________________________________
>>> For list-related administrative tasks:
>>> http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-dev
>>
>> _________________________________________________
>>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-dev
>>
>
>
>
> --
> 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
> _________________________________________________
>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-dev
>



-- 
sam th
samth at ccs.neu.edu