At Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:01:22 -0500, Eli Barzilay wrote: > We don't own some of them,
LD_LIBRARY_PATH > and some have no maintainer. Let's drop them. While we may lose some testing benefit, it's not worth trying to create builds for systems that have almost no users. > The first is > also an indication of a lost feature: being able to compile racket on > a typical server and deploy on a desktop. If Cairo is non-typical for server, then we had that feature only if you leave out the documentation build, which has required `racket/draw' for a while now. I wouldn't leave out the docs, so I don't see us as losing anything --- only gaining better support for compile-time images. At Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:30:54 -0500, Eli Barzilay wrote: > > Ideally, we would get these servers up to snuff. > > It might be possible, but I don't want to do so for several reasons, > in increasing order of importance: (1) I don't want to add > administration of an (ancient) OSX machine to my pile; See above (i.e., drop them). > (2) I don't > want to put conditions up for people who volunteer servers (I still > hope to get a *BSD machine at some point, and it's extremely popular > to find these in a no-gui setup); Cairo is not a GUI. This hasn't already happened, right? I'm skeptical that someone would be willing to donate *BSD resources and unwilling to install Cairo --- and even more skeptical that we would want to try to work in those kinds of constraints. > (3) most importantly, I imagine that > such errors would strongly discourage people with such setups from > using Racket. The last point was actually relevant for a long time, > with the GL stuff causing errors -- the answer to that was always > simple: you won't be able to use only the stuff that depends on GL, > which is a few games -- but when you deal with "the masses" there is > no magical collective memory and this came up again and again, and > people *did* worry about those warnings even when their intention was > to run a web server. I don't see how things will be different, given that the build relies `racket/draw' (i.e., the docs rely on it, and the docs are built by default, so people will get errors). Building libraries and setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH is easy. Caching images or falling back to run-time code is more difficult. Let's do the easy thing. _________________________ Racket Developers list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev
