[racket-dev] package-system update

See below

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 14, 2013, at 8:03 AM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <samth at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:

> First, thanks for the very informative update.
>
> On Sat, Jul 13, 2013 at 2:56 PM, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
>> [Guess:] The "Racket" and "Minimal Racket" distributions might point
>> to different pre-built package catalogs. Possibly, the "Racket"
>> catalog never updates packages that were included in the installer (on
>> the grounds that the user may not have write permission to the
>> install), while the "Minimal Racket" catalog includes more frequent
>> updates for bug fixes (on the grounds that the user can update any
>> installed package).
>
> I'm not 100% sure what you mean about "different pre-built package
> catalogs" but I definitely feel that we should just have one site like
> `pkg.racket-lang.org` where people go to see what packages they might
> install in their Racket installation.  This comes back to the point
> you make below about how technology, here the package server, can keep
> a distributed community together.

The ability to easily replace the server will be useful for people
building "frozen" services where a piece of software wants to ensure
that no updates could happen.


>
>> ** Using the bleeding edge as a PLT developer
>>
>> As a convenience to PLT developers, who tend to work on a particular
>> set of packages, there is an alternate way of working on the bleeding
>> edge (which anyone can use, if they prefer).
>>
>> [Guess #1:] Instead of cloning the core Racket repo, clone a "main
>> distribution" repo that has the core Racket repo as a submodule, plus
>> git submodules for each of the packages that are dependencies of
>> "main-distribution". In other words, you get something that looks like
>> the current Racket repo, but that uses git submodules.
>>
>> [Guess #2:] Instead of cloning the core Racket repo from GitHub, you
>> clone from the "main distribution" repository, just like now. In
>> addition to being mirrored to GitHub directly, individual parts of the
>> "main distribution" repo are mirrored as GitHub repositories, and
>> the mirrors are the ones that "pkg.racket-lang.org" references.
>
> Guess #2 seems to have a lot more complicated working parts, and it
> seems like it would prevent us from actually using github for the all
> the repositories -- ie, that we'd have to keep running our own git
> server.
>
> Finally, can you say anything about whether you anticipate the release
> process changing?  Would it be possible to decouple the core Racket
> releases from, say, the Typed Racket releases, with a release of the
> whole system bundling specific versions of everything?
>
> Sam
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