[plt-scheme] package management thoughts

On Mar 10, Jacob Matthews wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Mar 2003, Eli Barzilay wrote:
> 
> > (Side question -- why is the "p" there?  It just sounds too much
> > similar to cpan.  (I generally dislike the cXan names, they all
> > sound too similar and one differentiating character is just too
> > little...))
> 
> CSPAN was my first idea for a name. If anyone has a better name, let
> me know!

I think that PLTNET sounds much better...


> It seems there are a few different ways the system could handle
> this.  First, we could take it as evidence that contracts aren't a
> good match for the compatiblity problem. Second, we could agree that
> some contracts are useful and others are not, and allow library
> authors to specify some portion of their interfaces and ignore those
> portions when we perform checks (possibly along with warning users
> when they're upgrading a package whose unstable interface is being
> used by another package or something along those lines). Third, we
> could decide that your use of interfaces is incompatible with an
> automatic-upgrade system and require that library authors not have
> unstable interfaces if they want to make use of the compatibility
> features of CSPAN.
> 
> Of those, the third option appeals to me the least and the second
> appeals to me the most, but I'm worried that I'm just falling into
> trap of throwing new features at every problem. It'd be better to
> make a system in which some reasonable design pattern gave you this
> capacity for free.

I have the same preferences you have, but I'm not sure a simple
division to stuff that goes in the contract and things that don't is
the right thing.  Many times you'll have a fuzzier distinction.
Swindle is just an extreme case -- the presence of a MOP means that
you get a whole range of user functionality...

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                  http://www.barzilay.org/                 Maze is Life!