[racket-dev] proposal: `data' collection

From: Jay McCarthy (jay.mccarthy at gmail.com)
Date: Fri Jul 2 07:22:08 EDT 2010

On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 5:17 AM, Robby Findler
<robby at eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote:
> Those numbers seem pretty small in today's disk sizes, but I do agree
> that there is value in being able to divide up the distribution and to
> be able to stratify things so we can better keep track of our
> dependencies.

I feel like I routinely download programs and dev environments where
the distribution is over 100MBs.

> (BTW, just a random question: have you thought about
> trying to visualize the collection-level dependencies with, say, dot?)

My student did that. It is absurd. I'll CC him to get the image.

Jay

>
> It seems like you're after something that would allow multiple
> collections with the same name. Is that part of it, all of it, or
> mostly irrelevant to your main issue?
>
> Robby
>
> On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 1:15 AM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
>> [Sorry for the late reply.]
>>
>>
>> On Jun 30, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>>> Which part is a symptom? My request for a description when there's
>>> no owner?
>>>
>>> The no-owner fact?
>>>
>>> The unstable collects?
>>
>> "All of the above."
>>
>> Here are some questions that can demonstrate the problem better:
>>
>> 1. What text would you expect to find in the "purpose.txt" file of
>>   `unstable'?  Of `data'?
>>
>> 2. My course code is installed in a local collection named `pl'.  Why
>>   would I need to rename it if a new `pl' module was added to the
>>   racket distribution?
>>
>> 3. Say that you want to install apache on your machine.  What would
>>   you think if your OS tells you that you need to install powerpoint
>>   for that?
>>
>> 4. Assuming that there is a `data' collection with a few known data
>>   structures implemented, what happens when there's another data
>>   structure that happens to be just the thing for some project X
>>   and otherwise it's not too useful, or at least it seems that way.
>>   Why can't project X come with a new data/foo module?
>>
>> In any case, keep in mind that there is another way to make me stop
>> saying "coherent" and "package" -- give up the idea of ever getting a
>> smaller racket distribution, and the problem is solved.  We won't even
>> need the distribution specs, since everything will be included...
>> (From my POV, this would work out great since it looks like the
>> general attitude towards it is that it's just something that *I*
>> choose to be concerned with, and otherwise there's no problems.)
>>
>> For reference, here's a table of installer sizes (the Windows one,
>> which has the highest compression) and source bundle size (the unix
>> one, which has the highest compression in the sources bundles), with
>> roughly one representative per year:
>>
>>                 bin   src
>>      ver  year  size  size
>>      ---  ----  ----  ----
>>       53  1998  2.6M
>>      103  2000  3.4M  4.6M
>>      200  2001  4.3M  6.7M
>>      203  2002  4.8M  6.0M
>>      205  2003  5.8M  7.6M
>>      209  2004  8.4M  11M
>>      300  2005  12M   13M
>>      372  2007  14M   15M
>>      4.0  2008  22M   14M
>>      4.2  2009  25M   15M
>>      5.0  2010  28M   16M
>>
>> --
>>          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
>>                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!
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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


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