[racket-dev] planet2

My biggest comments on planet2...

* I like the general ideas of permitting more decentralized sharing of 
packages (such as through some kind of Git URLs).

* I like the idea of making it easier to modify the source of a package 
and share changes with upstream (which is needlessly cumbersome with 
PLaneT 1).

* I'm very concerned about discarding support for mixing versions of 
packages.  PLaneT 1 didn't fully nail this, but I suspect planet2 is 
punting needlessly, rather than getting data and solving problems 
(perhaps due to changing mission, as speculated in next two points).

* Other than GitHub support, a lot of what I saw in the planet2 
documentation was not intuitive to me, wrt how I was thinking would be a 
good direction for Racket grassroots package development.  It looks like 
maybe planet2 is biased towards the way core developers work (e.g., 
centralized, large, monolithic code base, with single version), and/or 
towards modularizing Racket distributions, rather than towards 
grassroots package development.

* Related to previous point, it also looks like there *might* (unclear) 
be a desire to increasingly centralize or canonicalize some of the kinds 
of library work that I've been thinking are generally best done in a 
more decentralized and organic manner.  If so, have to be careful with this.

* We'd talked about planet2 on-and-off for years, but I didn't realize 
planet2 was imminent, so I recently somehow managed to spent a lot of 
unpleasant time working on PLaneT tools and such that now look moot in 
light of planet2.  Every now and then, the rug gets pulled out from 
under a non-core developer (this has happened a few times that I know 
of), and it can be a waste of energy and morale, so we should keep 
trying to avoid rug-pulling when practical.

I have numerous small comments, (like, just from glancing at currently 
open browser window) you probably don't want to call anything "PNS", and 
the names "galaxy", "solar-system", and "planet" would be confusing 
(something else already called "planet" that is very related, plus 
running into HtDP "world", "universe", etc.).  Before I'd nitpick at 
that small level of issue, I'd need the bigger questions above 
addressed, and then I'd have to get practical experience with planet2 
and comment on that level of issue.

Neil V.