[racket-dev] Package compatibility

The problem with that is that there is no way to ensure that there is
only one package named "data/red-black-tree" and there can be two
mutually incompatible universes of packages for Carl's rbts and mine,
for instance. Furthermore, it has the internal linking problem.

On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 7:11 AM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> Yesterday, Jay McCarthy wrote:
>> Planet attempts to solve this problem technically by (a) having all
>> collections be prefixed by <author>/<package-name> and (b) mandating
>> a centralized server that enforces unique <author>s and unique
>> <package-name>s per author. Since Racket packages don't have a
>> mandated central server we can't enforce uniqueness like that. (i.e.
>> even if we mandated the prefix by <package-name>, there's no way to
>> enforce unique package names across the universe without a central
>> server.) Furthermore, bringing <package-name>s in to the code would
>> give us /internal linking/ which Racket packages are designed to
>> avoid for other reasons.
>>
>> Since technical solutions to this problem are lacking,
>
> An easy way to make it a non problem would be to eliminate the extra
> indirection that is in package names: if the package that Carl is
> asking about is *named* "data/red-black-tree" then it clearly
> conflicts with another package with the same name.
>
> --
>           ((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