[racket-dev] Installing subsets of Racket

Hi,

(this is not a complain, just an inquiry)

While installing Racket on a small server, I wanted to avoid installing gui
and doc related libraries.
The minimal install was great!

Then I wanted to install a package of my own (the aptly named "bazaar"),
which requires "images" and other gui libs (which I actually would not use
on the server), among other things, but no doc

But the "images" package draws racket-doc and gui-doc dependencies, which
in turn draws practically all of Racket. And it then takes a much longer
time for `raco setup` to do its job that I had hoped for.

Certainly, this can be resolved by splitting "images" and "bazaar" into
lib, gui and docs packages, but I foresee another problem:
It's difficult to enforce such a split for third-party libraries, as it
puts the burden on the user.
And the first package like that to be installed will again draw all of
Racket dependencies.

This is probably not a trivial matter, but what can be done about this?

My dream would be that gui and doc dependencies are never triggered,
without preventing the packages I actually use to be downloaded, but I
don't know how this could actually be ensured without a good amount of
magic.

Merely preventing downloads does not sound like a good option though.

I bet you've already discussed this far and wide, so are there any plans?

Laurent
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