[racket-dev] proposal for moving to packages

At Tue, 21 May 2013 10:46:29 -0400, David Van Horn wrote:
> On 5/20/13 4:42 PM, Matthew Flatt wrote:
> > This plan has two prominent implications:
> >
> >   * The current git repo's directory structure will change.
> 
> Will this directory structure change have an impact on how modules are 
> referenced?

The package system is designed to separate the way that modules are
referenced from the way that they are installed. Whether the module
`realm/chapter10/source' is part of the core, installed by the user as
a package, or included as an pre-installed package in a distribution, a
reference to the module within a program is always `(require
realm/chapter10/source)'.

A reference to the module of the form "look in the 'collects'
directory's 'realm' subdirectory", however, would be broken by the
directory-structure change, and we'd have to do extra work to manage
that (such as keeping a note in the core or special-cased distributions
to point to the new path).