[racket-dev] current packages' docs, errors, and conflicts

At Tue, 8 Jul 2014 11:49:49 -0400, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 11:35 AM, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> > At Tue, 8 Jul 2014 10:15:10 -0400, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote:
> >>  - I think we need to support planet packages -- there are some people
> >> still releasing new ones, and there are old ones would take
> >> non-trivial work to port.
> >
> > Supporting Planet packages is a lot of work. Overcoming constrained
> > network access in the sandbox is the most obvious problem and probably
> > easy to solve. A more subtle and important piece of the puzzle is the
> > notion of "built" packages, which can be quickly installed for
> > dependent packages or for assembling documentation at the end. Planet
> > packages don't have a "built" concept, and a package that depends on a
> > Planet package won't have the right "built" properties: it will
> > install, but not quickly.
> >
> > I think we're much better off moving Planet packages to supported
> > packages in the new package system --- at least, for use by packages in
> > the new package system.
> 
> i was mostly thinking of handling packages from
> planet-compat.racket-lang.org, which would avoid (some of) the network
> access issues and perhaps also the "built" package issues.
> 
> But maybe the problem then just reappears for the regular Planet
> packages that the planet-compat packages depend on?

I think the planet-compat packages have been converted to depend on
other planet-compat packages. Maybe they'll work out, but it doesn't
seem worth the effort to me. Support for those packages to date has
been good and valuable, but we could reasonably draw the line at this
point.