(Sorry, I'm on my phone and can't something more precise...) Actually, this suggests a good easy to do the guessing thing: see if the 'repo-time-stamp' exists (in the installation directory). This will play nicely with 3rd party packagers who are not supposed to include it. <div class="gmail_quote">On Jan 6, 2013 1:27 PM, "Matthew Flatt" <<a href="mailto:mflatt@cs.utah.edu">mflatt@cs.utah.edu</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> At Sun, 6 Jan 2013 11:42:52 -0500, Eli Barzilay wrote: > Yesterday, Matthew Flatt wrote: > > I have been thinking about how developers who build their own Racket > > are more likely to want installation-wide packages instead of user- > > and version-specific packages. This is particularly true for those > > of us who work from the git respository. > [...] > I'm also saying that [...] the goal > of this is to get defaults that "just work" for everyone, assuming > that we can do whatever magic is needed to get user/version-specific > packages in the resulting distributions, and assuming that `--prefix' > is used only by 3rd-party packagers. I think that such an assumption > is wrong, and there are lots of people who build from source using > `--prefix', and these people would have that extra tweak to keep in > mind. (And and bear in mind that a non-`--prefix' build is so much > more convenient yet people still use it: it means that people only > prefer it out of habit and other project conventions, so these people > are unlikely to remember the extra tweak.) > > So assuming that I got everything right (which is highly > questionable), I think that it's best to have the same default for all > setups, and use an installation-wide installs by default only when > asked explicitly. Ok, I agree that it's better to be conservative and consistent on this point, instead of trying to guess correctly. For now, I've added: * A `default-scope' installation-wide package configuration that selects the default package scope for `raco pkg' commands (when using the installation's `raco pkg'). Set it with raco pkg config -i --set default-scope <scope> * An `--enable-pkgscope=...' option to `configure', which sets the installation's `default-scope' configuration on install. This is just a slightly streamlined way to get a source-based build set up right the first time. If you don't specify `--enable-pkgscope' with `configure', then any existing configuration for an installation is preserved by `make install'. In any case, I think having an installation-specific default for package scope turns out to work a lot better than my previous suggestion of an environment variable. </blockquote></div>