[racket-dev] proposal: `data' collection

This sounds like a good plan to me. Taking a month to think thru the
issues carefully to plan the talk can only have good consequences for
the discussion. And delaying the solution for the release after August
does not seem like it hurts anything.

Robby

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 9:34 PM, Matthias Felleisen
<matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> I do not understand your answer.
>
> I nominate you for a major speech at PLT day.
> You can get up to 30 mins full time and 30 mins
> of discussion time.
>
> If things aren't clear after that, you will never
> be allowed again to use the words 'coherent' and
> 'package.'
>
> Until then I propose we postpone collects/data/ .
>
> This is a one-month delay and I think in our interest.
>
>
>
>
> On Jun 30, 2010, at 10:28 PM, Eli Barzilay wrote:
>
>> On Jun 30, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>>> Eli, I do not understand and/or appreciate your objection.
>>>
>>> Here is what I understand:
>>>
>>> -- you believe that top-level collects are something coherent
>>>    Q: could you explain this? In what sense is lang/ more or less
>>>    coherent than data/
>>
>> They are currently coherent by necessity, because very little can be
>> done with their contents.  For example, the `lang' collection has both
>> the student languages and the r5rs implementation -- and this was a
>> mess because they cannot be separated.  Later on this was cleared up
>> by moving the r5rs code into its own collection.  Another problem
>> around `lang': we've talked about moving generic language support
>> there (like `syntax/module-reader'), but this is impractical to do
>> with the current setup.
>>
>> Back to `data', the problem is that you cannot have two toplevel
>> `data' collections -- which means that you cannot have separate
>> distributions of `data/foo' and `data/bar' since they must both appear
>> in your plt installation or in your user directory -- not in both.
>>
>>
>>> -- you introduce the notion of a package
>>>    Q: what is that and how does it differ from a collects?
>>
>> A package would be a (coherent) unit of distribution -- it should be
>> possible to distribute it as an independent unit, it should have an
>> owner (one or more people) -- but most of all, it should be clear what
>> code is in the package.  Currently, we only have collections some with
>> no owner, some have files that are owned by different people.  And to
>> put things very concretely, I want to start working on the
>> distribution thing -- and a solution to this problem is *needed*.
>> I think that we're beyond the reasonable limit of a monolithic
>> distribution -- so splitting it up to such packages is necessary.
>>
>> (That's why I said that the name is only a symptom, and that overall I
>> *want* to see a solution to this.  And I want one now (as in august),
>> not in some hypothetical future.)
>>
>> --
>>          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
>>                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!
>
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