[racket-dev] proposal for moving to packages

On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 10:05 PM, Eric Dobson <eric.n.dobson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure I follow on why binary packages make it easier to reduce
> dependencies between packages, or why binary packages offer faster
> installs.
>
> I'm guessing that binary packages prevent cyclic dependencies between
> packages, but it seems like there are many other options that still
> get this side effect. Such as explicit checks when building the
> package.

If you have the source, then you need all the phase >= 1 dependencies,
but if you just have the binary then you only need the phase = 0 deps.
Similarly, for building the documentation.

> For faster installs, the only benefit I see of binary packages over
> precompiled source packages is a small savings in size which doesn't
> seem like it would amount to much of the install time.

In my tree, I have 20M of compiled code and 13M of source. I like the
idea of a reduction of about 50% in size of downloads.

However, the faster install point is really about the fact that users
won't need to run "raco setup" and do the compilation/documentation
build once they do the download of the source.

Jay

> Can someone explain the claims for binary packages?
>
> On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Jon Zeppieri <zeppieri at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 10:04 PM, Neil Van Dyke <neil at neilvandyke.org> wrote:
>>> [snip]
>>>
>>> Example: Imagine I'm in the middle of writing a Racket program and am
>>> wondering about characteristics of some kind of I/O port in Racket.  With
>>> transparent source accessibility, I can just click on an identifier in my
>>> program in DrRacket to start browsing the implementation.  Maybe I see a
>>> possible improvement, or seeing the source pre-empts yet another email list
>>> question that otherwise only Matthew could answer, or I feel empowered to go
>>> add a new feature.  If the source is not as accessible, then I'm more likely
>>> to be a mere naive user of the tools, rather than to understand the tools
>>> and help improve them.
>>>
>>
>> +inf.0
>>
>> Though the easiest way to make the source available is just to keep it
>> in the distribution. I'll be sad to see it go.
>>
>> -Jon
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--
Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay

"The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93