[plt-scheme] planet require idea

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 1:06 PM, Jacob Matthews <jacobm at cs.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>
>  I chose the syntax I did because it reminds me of the syntax one uses
>  for specifying a path on a remote machine with scp; I suppose that's
>  kind of an idiosyncratic choice though. I definitely think the
>  major.minor syntax looks good, but what would the more advanced
>  minor-version selectors look like? 3.>=5 looks a bit messy to me.
>
>  One potential way to do it would be to introduce brackets:
>
>  owner/package:1/path
>  owner/package:1.5/path
>  owner/package:1.[<=5]/path
>  owner/package:1.[>=5]/path
>  owner/package:1.[3-7]/path
>
>  This would make the versionless spec look like:
>
>  owner/package:/path
>
>  which looks a bit ugly, but that's fine with me because I think people
>  shouldn't generally specify packages without at least a major version
>  anyway.

Brackets in what's supposed to be a non-sexpression format is
counterintuitive, possibly problematic.  Also, there's no reason to
keep the colon when not using a version number.  And I agree that
period is weird-lookin' when using <= and friends.  So how about:

owner/package/path -- versionless
owner/package:major/path -- major-only
owner/package:major:minor/path -- major and minor

There are no more colons than necessary at any point, and (to pick an
example familiar to me):

robby/redex:4:<=4/reduction-semantics.ss

doesn't look so bad (at least better than "4.<=4").

-- 
Carl Eastlund