[racket-dev] package install mode

Yesterday, Ray Racine wrote:
> On installation issues:
> 
> 1) Yes on defaulting to an installation-wide install as default.

Matthew didn't suggest this as a default for all cases -- but just to
be clear: an installation-wide as default is not something that is
always better.  In fact, it is in many cases worse.  For example, on
Linux (and probably on OSX) you can end up with permission errors,
which can easily lead people down the usual path of sudo-ing the
command which now means running random code as root (and most people
would do a sudo since that doesn't require reading more, and will miss
whatever flags are needed for private installation).  Another example
is what can happen on Windows -- wither get some intimidating popup
telling you about changing system directories, or worse, get the
"feature" of windows pretending to save files in the right place but
really putting them in your own directory.


> 3) Many (even most) of the collections library are non-core and IMHO
> should be evicted out into separate github hosted projects with
> drop-dead simple installation via Planet2 on demand.  I know this
> sounds harsh, but collects is over due for a healthy paring, if not
> a full blown gastric by-pass.

Absolutely.  There are many sub-packages in the core now that got in
based on the assumption that they'll turn into independent packages.
There are also some people (ahem) who were screaming for ages about
bad spaghetti dependency graphs which will cause huge problems when
trying to get to a small core.

(/me does an image query for "repent".)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!