[racket-dev] planet2 and versions

On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 11:48 PM, David Vanderson
<david.vanderson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was professionally writing Ruby code as that community struggled through
> package issues.  I hope that experience can shed some light here.  Also I'd
> like to understand the basic use cases and how they work in planet2.
>
> As a user, here are my 2 use cases:
>
> 1. My friend tells me about awesome library X, and I want to install it and
> use it.  Planet2 makes this easy.
>
> 2. I have an existing app running and I want to replicate it exactly
> somewhere else (including libraries).  I'm not sure this is possible with
> raw Planet2.  The Ruby community finally dealt with this by saving the full
> library dependency list in a file ("bundle", with version numbers) that you
> save alongside your app.  It works fairly well.

This is on my future plans to make a "raco pkg bundle" that will
produce a big tar ball that and can be installed on another machine
and get the same packages (even if they are no longer available at
their sources with those versions) installed. I just didn't prioritize
it for the beta release.

Jay

> Their experience suggests that accidental backwards incompatible changes in
> libraries happen frequently enough to need some kind of support for.
> Compatibility with the core language was not supported.  Either a library's
> webpage would say "requires ruby core >= 1.8.x", or sometimes importing the
> library would produce an error message telling you the same.
>
> Do these use cases make sense?  (I'd like to hear about library developer
> use cases, but I have no experience there)
>
> Thanks,
> Dave
>
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--
Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay

"The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93