[racket] Distribution strategy

From: Erich Rast (erich at snafu.de)
Date: Wed Jul 13 09:02:38 EDT 2011

Perhaps I don't really understand the question. R6RS is a standard, so
insofar as an implementation is standards-compliant the source
distribution should not need to be modified for different
implementations.

In praxis, however, there might be problems due to lack of complete
standards compliance. AFAIK, racket is not 100% R6RS compliant, is it?
But if you have full end-user convenience in mind you will need to
provide build-scripts for implementations anyway. After all,
command-line parameters and other implementation-dependent issues are
not standardized at all. 

R6RS source code is not generally downward compatible with R5RS. Don't
complain about it too much, though. The R5RS standard is not detailed
enough enough (e.g. lack of a module system) to be upwards compatible to
anything. My guess is that R7RS will turn out to be a fairly
conservative extension to R6RS---but I might be wrong.

Best,

Erich

> And now to Scheme.  I wish to distribute Racket-supported R6RS scripts, and now I face a similar challenge.  Am I going to be forced to create binary distributions for every platform?  Is there a degree of sadness others feel about the lack of a presence of a standard interpreter we can just assume will be there?  But then, even getting people to install Scheme on various platforms, won't I then face version incompatibilities ("you need R6RS, not R5RS", etc), distributing the script alone, taking me back to binary distributions again?
> 
> 
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