[racket-dev] Planet 2 Beta Release

From: Robby Findler (robby at eecs.northwestern.edu)
Date: Thu Nov 8 19:44:52 EST 2012

I think it is important that you can get a program from the web, put
it into DrRacket, hit run, and get Something Good to happen, without
having to go type at command lines and whatnot. (This is especially
true for Windows, the platform something like 95% of our users use.)

Robby

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 3:44 PM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <samth at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 3:13 PM, Jay McCarthy <jay.mccarthy at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 11:01 AM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <samth at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> [replying just to a few of these]
>
>>> * I think we should drop the `.plt` archive format entirely.
>>
>> It is the default because Racket can create it and unarchive it
>> natively. If someone implements a native Racket zipper/unzipper, that
>> would be great. My understanding is that this is on Eli's todo list
>> and when it is done, it would be great to change Planet 2's default.
>
> Hopefully this can happen before Planet 2's release, so it wouldn't
> need to support .plt at all.
>
>>> * 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.
>>
>> The manifest is necessary because there's no reliable way to get a
>> directory list from a Web site.
>
> Then I would just suggest dropping the web-directory fetching instead,
> and just support archives at URLs.
>
>>> * In section 3.1, you should have 'git push -u origin master'.
>>
>> This is directly from the Github docs:
>> https://help.github.com/articles/create-a-repo
>
> If you create a fresh repo on GH, you get instructions with the `-u`
> option -- I'm surprised that they haven't updated the help site.
>
>>> * I thought the conclusion of a recent discussion on dev@ was that
>>> tests, typed, etc sub-collections *are* preferred.
>>
>> I think I missed this conversation. I don't understand the conclusion
>> given that we don't want to always distribute tests, for example.
>
> This discussion was here:
> http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev/archive/2012-October/010507.html
>
> I'm not sure there was a definitive conclusion, but Robby/Eli/Matthias
> seems to be on the sub-collection side.
>
>>> * Can the Planet1 compatibility also have a version-less translation
>>> for the latest version, so that `jaymccarthy/opencl/module` could keep
>>> working?
>>
>> I don't want that version-less one to conflict with any of the other
>> ones so that Planet 1 packages that rely on multiple versions will
>> work. Am I missing a part of the request?
>
> I'm just suggesting that `../opencl` and `.../opencl1` should both exist.
>
>>> * I think the auto-installing module resolver mentioned in "Short
>>> Term" is a bad idea -- it's already really easy to install packages
>>> with this system, and auto-installation just introduces possibility
>>> for headaches.
>>
>> I don't think it is *bad* idea, but I also don't think it is
>> *necessary*. But there are other people in the Racket group who think
>> this is totally necessary for Planet 2. I'll let them explain why.
>
> I'll look forward to that explanation.
> --
> sam th
> samth at ccs.neu.edu
> _________________________
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