[plt-scheme] slib packaging

MJ Ray <markj at cloaked.freeserve.co.uk> writes at 11:34 16-Dec-2002 GMT:
> I suspect it depends what you regard as a "platform".  If you are using a
> system with package management of its own, then dependencies outside the PLT
> system (eg databases, SLIB) can be handled easily by that way.

I'm sympathetic to your concerns about portability, and probably anyone
who is writing portable Scheme code that uses SLIB will want to have a
shared SLIB installation.

However, if a user wants to install a PLT-specific package "foo.plt",
and there's a dependency on SLIB, we have the problem that there are
numerous different ways to install SLIB, and not all of them will work
the first time that "foo.plt" attempts to load SLIB.

Having an "slib.plt" saves users time and frustration, and increases the
number of people who will end up successfully installing "foo.plt" --
because they decided the installation process was easy enough to try in
the first place, and because there are fewer things that can go wrong.

I think this demonstrates some of the motivation for PLT's
cross-platform package manager.

-- 
                                             http://www.neilvandyke.org/