Thanks for the responses. The responses propose three natural things:
1. We need the nightly builds.
2. Eli's component rules must be turned into something that people can
read up on.
3. The email about rule violations should not go to Eli but to plt-
dev. (It's all implemented, no need to shift it anywhere.)
;; ---
There were no comments on component-oriented distribution.
-- Matthias
On Nov 10, 2009, at 12:20 PM, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
Ladies and gentlemen,
Eli spent my first hour++ in my office this morning pointing our
serious flaws in our world. Here are two important points, and I am
putting them up for discussion here with a request for sensible
comments:
1. In some way we have been conducting a social experiment for the
past 10 days or so. As you all know, Eli spent a considerable time
creating the nightly build framework when he first arrived here.
From the nightly build, Eli's software also creates a nightly set of
deliveries and puts them up on the web somewhere. What you ma not
realize is that the nightly builds have been broken for some 10 days
due to the check-in of a module that breaks the component delivery
mechanism.
Nobody complained, so our conclusion was that nobody noticed. Our
second corollary was that perhaps we only have a camel-back
distribution of users: those who use svn and build from svn and
those that use only the releases. (As Eli walked out of my office, I
switched to my email and the first message contained a complaint
about the missing nightly deliveries. This means we know of one user
of the deliveries.)
2. Which brings me to the topic of "delivery by component."
Apparently few, if anyone here, is aware of Eli's carefully arrange
delivery layers:
-- smallest: plain mzscheme, no mred, no docs
-- mid size: mred, drscheme, no docs
-- largest: everything
Eli tells me that there are numerous people who use 'smallest'; I
don't know about mid.
He (and I and I know Robby) have for a long time envisioned a
delivery system that starts with a core package and then asks
(possibly via some gui) what other packages should be installed,
e.g., the 'mred' layer or the server. The three-tier delivery system
is a first step toward this component-oriented delivery.
Eli has carefully maintained a dependency graph and list (that takes
some 11megs) among the various files (8 platforms, 3 tiers,
everything spelled out). Since people aren't really aware of this
system, they easily and apparently relatively often break the non-
cyclic dependencies. (I am guilty of doing this myself when I wrote
the first docs that depended on slideshow.)
In my opinion, we have two options:
-- drop the dependency system and just deliver one large package
-- enforce the dependencies. If you break them, you get a message.
If you don't clean them up in N hours, the file is removed.
;; ---
As I said, sensible comments welcome. -- Matthias
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