[racket-dev] Planet 2 Beta Release

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 11:35 AM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> Jay: do you prefer off-line commentage?

No, this is fine.

> Meanwhile, I'll re-use some of Sam's text (I generally +1 all items
> that I have omitted):

I won't respond to points that I feel were answered re: Sam.

> 20 minutes ago, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote:
>>
>> * I think tying to GitHub is a mistake -- the system should work for
>> for arbitrary Git repositories.
>
> I very much agree with this -- but I don't want to see github support
> gone, just have it added as some plugin into the whole thing that can
> make github easier to work with.  With something like this it will be
> easy to write new ones for other places when people want them.
>
>
>> Having a short syntax for github is great, though.
>
> IIUC, the branch in the path is required, is that the case?  If so,
> then I think that it should really work without it too, to get the
> simple https://github.com/user/repo syntax.

Yes it is required. We could do that, right now there's not
assumptions like this (i.e. you always want master) anywhere else in
the system so I didn't do it.

>> * I think we should drop the `.plt` archive format entirely.
>
> +17.  I don't think that it can be removed completely though, but it
> definitely sounds like a mistake to use it as the default for creating
> new packages.
>
>
>> * It would be nice to have fewer special files.  For example,
>> `MANIFEST` could be abolished by just fetching the whole content of
>> the directory.  Checksums could be included in the `METADATA` file.
>
> +1 for fewer files.
>
> As for Sam's comment on MANIFEST -- I disagree with that -- it *is*
> required if you want to just make the files visible on some web page.
> (Since you cannot rely on a directory listing.)  It could be optional
> for formats that have a way to get that list though.

It is optional for those formats now. It is only used when you use the
remote directory URL source.

>> * Similarly, the names of the special files could avoid ALL-CAPS,
>> and I'd go with the name 'package' rather than `metadata`.
>
> Excited +1 for both!  (When I look at a directory listing, I'd like
> them to be de-emphasized.)
>
>
>> * We really need valid SSL certificates for any user-facing sites.
>> StartSSL gives them away for free: http://www.startssl.com/
>
> (Last time I looked, free SSLs weren't ones that would get trusted by
> default popular browsers.  If you're talking about some certificate,
> then making them is easy.)
>
>
>> * I thought the conclusion of a recent discussion on dev@ was that
>> tests, typed, etc sub-collections *are* preferred.
>
> Yes -- I said that, with the strong preference for projects being a
> self-contained directory, which would make management much simpler.
> (On authors, clients, and code.)
>
> --
>           ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
>                     http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!



--
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