[racket-dev] Things we could move out of the core

On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 4:32 PM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <samth at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> While moving some files around between packages, I realized that there
> are a number of things that could be moved out of the core and into
> packages.  Here's a partial list of things that I think are not needed
> at all by the rest of the core:

I've now done the first step of this work.  You can see the results
here: https://github.com/plt/racket/pull/373

This works to the degree that the core still compiles.  No other
testing has happened yet -- that's the next step. A number of packages
will need additional dependencies.

I'd like to get feedback on exactly how this is organized.  In
particular, a bunch of things are now in a `compatibility-lib`
collection:

* almost all of `mzlib`
* `compatibility/*`
* `racket/mpair` and `racket/mlist`

There's also the following new packages: `errortrace-lib`,
`errortrace-doc`, `unstable-contract-lib`, `unstable-options-lib`,
`sandbox-lib`, `data-lib`, `rackunit`.

The `help` collection moved to `scribble/lib`.

Where there isn't a new documentation package, libraries are mostly
documented in `unstable` or `racket-doc`.

Things that didn't move:

* `mzlib/compile`: This is used in one place in the compiler, and
should probably be handled differently.  Matthew, any suggestions?
* `mzlib/unit200`. This is loaded into a new namespace in which code
is evaluated in `setup/unpack`.  I don't understand what is happening
there, and thus won't change it.  It's also still used genuinely in
`file/gzip`.
* `mzlib/contract`. This is different enough from `racket/contract`
that I'd prefer to have someone who knows the contract system better
handle this.  Also, much of the contract system implementation is in
the `mzlib` directory, which seems odd.
* `srfi/13`: used in `net/cookie` in a way that's intertwined with
`srfi/14` and would be hard to remove on its own.
* `srfi/8`: Used in unmodified srfi code that we probably shouldn't change.
* Other SRFIs -- used in the `db` collection, or depended on by those that are.

Sam