[racket-dev] updated proposal for moving to packages

On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 8:19 PM, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
>
>
> I think we're at the point, though, for you to assess whether this is
> the right direction. If it looks like a good direction, then the
> follow-up question is how fast to move.
>
> Some possible conclusions:
>
>  1. This is the wrong way.
>
>  2. This is plausible, but the details are not right or not clear; we
>     should stick with our current repository structure for at least one
>     more release and consider switching after that.
>
>  3. This will work, and we should switch right away and start sorting
>     out the details together --- but we should not actually break out
>     into separate repositories until after a release or so.
>
>  4. This will work, we should try to switch right away --- AND we should
>     split the repository as soon as possible.

I'm mostly in favor of 3, but I'm still unsure about some of the
details.  I think we won't really converge on these details without
moving forward, so we should go with this, but my major concerns are:

- I'm not entirely happy with the -doc/-lib/etc split, since it seems
to make everything more verbose and difficult to work with.  But I
haven't tried developing in that environment, so maybe it's not a big
deal.  I also worry that it makes our repository less approachable to
new people.
- We still don't have a ton of experience with the package system
itself -- it's designated as beta in the current release, and there
are very few packages with non-trivial dependencies. In contrast, the
core repository has a lot of dependencies. For example, how will we
deal with backwards-incompatible changes to the split itself, since
packages are intended to be permanently compatible?

Sam