[racket-dev] experiment reorganizing the repo into packages

At Mon, 3 Jun 2013 08:27:19 -0400, Eli Barzilay wrote:
> On Thursday, Matthew Flatt wrote:
> > 
> > You've sketched out the producer side, and I'm not sure of some
> > about some of those details.  The consumer side seems even more
> > complex to me.  It seems like the package system would have to keep
> > track of which subpackages are installed for a package, provide an
> > interface to the user (e.g., in the GUI) for subpackages, and be
> > able to update a package with new subpackages --- all while tracking
> > dependencies at the level of subpackages. I'm sure it can all be
> > done, but I'm not sure how difficult or important it will be
> > relative to everything else that still needs to be done, and I'm
> > pretty sure it can't all be done right now.
> 
> A very cheap way to do this is to use these sub-package specifications
> only for creating packages for distribution.  With the obvious
> resulting package file names, this means that there is no change at
> all that is needed on the consumer side.

I don't understand the suggestion. As a concrete example, can you
sketch our how a user installs the "web-server" package without
documentation, and how the package manager later knows to upgrade the
"web-server" package to include documentation when requested by the
user?