[plt-dev] Re: Generated files and co-existing copies of DrScheme

From: Carl Eastlund (cce at ccs.neu.edu)
Date: Fri Nov 20 08:50:46 EST 2009

Pardon my pre-morning-coffee thinking.  There were a few mistakes here:

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 8:35 AM, Carl Eastlund <cce at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>> 3. IIUC, the only problem that this solves is using several different
>>   installations with the same version number, is this true?  Is that
>>   problem *so* common?  If so, then maybe have instead a way to use
>>   your own additional suffix to the version part that gets used in
>>   ~/.plt-scheme/<here>/ and ~/.plt-scheme/planet/300/<here>/ ?
>
> I run into this problem every single day when I update my PLT trunk
> checkout.  I either have to spend the duration of a complete build
> (including all documentation, installed planet packages, and recovery
> from any build errors) unable to run any PLT Scheme code of any
> variety -- essentially unable to work -- or I need some way to have
> two PLT Scheme installations of the same version that don't "share"
> compiled planet code.

The above describes the problem I run into in general, much of which
is alleviated by PLTPLANETDIR.  I still have the problem of clashing
docs, so I can't run Help Desk in the interim and I'm stuck with the
newest version afterword.  However I am able to run mzscheme,
drscheme, planet, setup-plt, etc.

>>   Or maybe go the other way -- make the default addon-dir include the
>>   version (so on linux it becomes ~/.plt-scheme/<version>), and have
>>   no version directory for the local collects (so they end up in
>>   exactly the same place), planet can drop the version directory too
>>   (and the redundantly outdated "300" part).  Then it makes more
>>   sense to have a command line flag or environment variable move
>>   everything, without getting a second level of version-dependant
>>   directories.  (The only problem that I see here is that the planet
>>   "cache" is less of a cache than it is now.)
>
> Maybe we need two settings -- PLTADDONIR and PLTVERSION.  The
> PLTADDONDIR would then be static (I'd have no need to set it more than
> once -- and if I don't mind the default, not at all), and have a
> subdirectory for each version, plus one for a shared planet cache.
> Then I could set PLTVERSION for separate installations, which would
> override the version string *only* for the purposes of choosing a
> subdirectory of PLTADDONDIR.  The directory tree would look like this:
>
> $PLTADDONDIR/
>  planet-cache/
>  4.2.2/
>    collects/
>    planet/
>    scribblings/
>  4.2.2.1/
>    collects/
>    planet/
>    scribblings/
>  ...and so forth...

Moving PLTCOLLECTS here is odd because that's usually a user
directory, much like planet development links.  So I'm not sure if the
collects/ subdirectory should be there.  And perhaps the preferences
file should be there (at the same level as planet-cache).  Since this
part is all hypothetical, the structure is up for debate anyway.

--Carl


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