[racket-dev] Package management

That all sounds like exactly what I had in mind, with different (pretty
much better) terminology.

Carl Eastlund

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 3:17 PM, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:

> The package system has a notion of "auto" packages, which are packages
> that were automatically installed to satisfy dependencies. Also, `raco
> pkg remove' supports an `--auto' flag for automatically removing auto
> packages that have no non-auto packages depending on them.
>
> So, instead of adding package roots, one possibility is:
>
>  * Make `raco pkg show' show only non-auto packages by default.
>
>  * Change the `pkg-links' Makefile target to install only links for
>    packages needed by a particular package (which defaults to some sort
>    of "main-distribution" package), and to install links forced by
>    dependencies as "auto".
>
> The second bullet is along a direction that things are moving, anyway.
>
> I think there will need to be some other refinements to auto mode. For
> example, if you have a package in auto mode and you try to install it,
> I think you get an already-installed error and the package stays in
> auto mode. But those are small changes, I think.
>
> Does this sound enough like what you had in mind?
>
> At Thu, 27 Jun 2013 12:53:59 -0400, Carl Eastlund wrote:
> > I just ran "raco pkg show" on a fresh install, and its output is huge
> now.
> > Of course, this is inevitable when we break the distribution up into many
> > packages, but it makes the tool unmanageable for routine use.  I'd like
> to
> > propose a way around this, that would also solve some of my normal
> > usability gripes with package managers.
> >
> > I propose we have "package roots" -- roots to the forest of package
> > dependencies.  These are the packages the user actually wants; every
> other
> > installed package is pulled in as the dependencies to support these.
>  Then
> > "raco pkg show" can show just these packages, so in a fresh install we'd
> > just see "racket" or "racket+gui" or whatever.  We could add a flag to
> show
> > everything, when necessary.
> >
> > This also gives us some room to automate removal of packages the user
> > doesn't need.  For instance, if I install package A which depends on B,
> C,
> > and D, of course raco pkg install will install B, C, and D.  If I remove
> > package A, currently B, C, and D are going to stay unless I explicitly
> > remove them, if I recall correctly.  If we base our system on a set of
> root
> > packages, then B, C, and D would be removable as soon as A is removed,
> if A
> > was a root and the others were not.  We could have "raco pkg remove A"
> > remove them immediately, or we could have some explicit "raco pkg
> cleanup"
> > to remove them.  Whichever way we go, we could add a flag to "raco pkg
> > remove" to swap behavior.  This would make cleaning up a lot easier when
> a
> > package has many dependencies.  It would also mean upgrading a package
> > whose dependencies have changed would allow the system to automatically
> > clean up dependencies that aren't needed any more.
> >
> > I don't know how hard it would be to implement this, but I think it would
> > make the package system much more usable to present 90% of the
> interactions
> > solely in terms of the top-level packages the user cares about, and do
> all
> > the cleanup of dependency packages silently in the background when
> possible.
> >
> > Carl Eastlund
> > _________________________
> >   Racket Developers list:
> >   http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev
>
>
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