[racket] waiting for pkg catalog update?

On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 12:13 PM, John Clements <johnbclements at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow! I really like the new package system!
>
> Okay, now I'm going to complain...
>
> I'm having trouble with pkgs.racket-lang.org, and it's affecting my classes.
>
> The issue here is that the catalog doesn't seem to have picked up my last
> change to the rsound package, made some time yesterday. In particular, I had
> to roll back two packages, portaudio and rsound, and portaudio got rolled
> back but not rsound, which means that the pkg-reported current version of
> rsound (16a1959962f) (as opposed to the github-reported current version of
> ((0e28de6c)) now has a dependency on a version of portaudio (1.0.1) that is
> no longer available. (This can also be seen by the build status of rsound,
> which is now shown on pkgs.racket-lang.org as failing.)
>
> I've tried to update using the web page, with not so much success.
> Yesterday, the web page was getting stuck at the "logging in..." phase; I
> waited for ... 10 minutes? No joy. Today, I'm seeing the same thing, though
> 20 minutes ago I saw a successful login, with a thin yellow banner
> indicating that an update was in progress.
>
> Perhaps the answer here is to host my own catalog for my students. I spent
> 10 minutes looking into this, but I got stuck when it turned out that
> pkgs/meta/pkg-catalog/ isn't actually part of my installation.

The catalog protocol [1] is extremely easy to implement by hand. If
you have a public_html setup in your university's Web machine, here's
what you do:

mkdir public_html/catalog
cd public_html/catalog
cat > rsound <<END
#hash((source . "github:///")(checksum . "deadbeef"))
END
cat > portaudio <<END
#hash((source . "github:///")(checksum . "deadbeef"))
END

You now have a catalog! Tell your students to add
"http://xxx/~mcjbc/catalog" and you're in business. (When you make a
commit change the checksum string.)

1. http://docs.racket-lang.org/pkg/catalog-protocol.html?q=catalog

> Another solution would be to manually instruct my students to paste the
> github reference into the "do what I mean" box, but I suspect this would
> lead to confusion and unhappiness in the medium term.

This is the easiest thing to do in your case, because if they have a
"github" package installed, then when you tell them to "update" the
turn-around time would be instant.

> So: if there's a good way to poke pkgs.racket-lang.org to pick up the new
> version of rsound, I'd love to hear it.
>
> Thanks again for all the hard work! It keeps getting better!
>
> John
>
>
>
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>



-- 
Jay McCarthy
http://jeapostrophe.github.io

           "Wherefore, be not weary in well-doing,
      for ye are laying the foundation of a great work.
And out of small things proceedeth that which is great."
                          - D&C 64:33