On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 11:01 AM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <sa...@ccs.neu.edu> wrote: > On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 8:16 AM, Jay McCarthy <jay.mccar...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Now that the 5.3.1 release is finished, I've just pushed the beta release of >> Planet 2 to the Racket core. > > Here, as promised, more detailed but small comments. I have one > larger design issue, which I want to write up in a separate mail. > > * I think the places you use 'PLT' in the documentation should be > replace with 'Racket maintainers' -- PLT is a research group with lots > of overlap with the Racket maintainers.
Sure. > * I think tying to GitHub is a mistake -- the system should work for > for arbitrary Git repositories. Having a short syntax for github is > great, though. Additionally, we should support fixing a checksum for > a package. The npm docs have a similar list of things that can be > installed here: https://npmjs.org/doc/install.html Github automatically generates zip/tgz files. Planet 2 knows nothing about Github other than this and the URL structure of their site to get them and the checksums. If you'd like to implement general git support, I think that would be great, but it is more work than I have time to do. I can point you in the right direction. > * I think we should drop the `.plt` archive format entirely. It is the default because Racket can create it and unarchive it natively. If someone implements a native Racket zipper/unzipper, that would be great. My understanding is that this is on Eli's todo list and when it is done, it would be great to change Planet 2's default. > * It would be nice to have a command-line way of publishing a package > to a name service. I don't want to legislate how that works, force all service to support publishing, or reimplement the pieces of the Web browser that submit the forms, etc. Additionally, I expect you do this rarely. > * I think use 'dont-' in command line arguments is potentially > confusing, and the 'no-' prefix is more common in other software. I have no preference about this shed color. If others feel strongly, it can change. > * It would be nice to have fewer special files. For example, > `MANIFEST` could be abolished by just fetching the whole content of > the directory. Checksums could be included in the `METADATA` file. The manifest is necessary because there's no reliable way to get a directory list from a Web site. The checksum can't be in the metadata because the metadata is in the archive, but you need to be able to get the checksum without getting the archive. > * Similarly, the names of the special files could avoid ALL-CAPS, and > I'd go with the name 'package' rather than `metadata`. I have no preference about this shed color. If others feel strongly, it can change. > * I think 'update' with no arguments shouldn't do a global operation; > use `-a/--all` for that, otherwise it's easy (say in scripts) to > accidentally trigger the global behavior. I'll make this change soon. > * In section 3.1, you should have 'git push -u origin master'. This is directly from the Github docs: https://help.github.com/articles/create-a-repo > * We really need valid SSL certificates for any user-facing sites. > StartSSL gives them away for free: http://www.startssl.com/ I agree that the Racket maintainers should buy something like this. > * I thought the conclusion of a recent discussion on dev@ was that > tests, typed, etc sub-collections *are* preferred. I think I missed this conversation. I don't understand the conclusion given that we don't want to always distribute tests, for example. > * Can the Planet1 compatibility also have a version-less translation > for the latest version, so that `jaymccarthy/opencl/module` could keep > working? I don't want that version-less one to conflict with any of the other ones so that Planet 1 packages that rely on multiple versions will work. Am I missing a part of the request? > * I think the auto-installing module resolver mentioned in "Short > Term" is a bad idea -- it's already really easy to install packages > with this system, and auto-installation just introduces possibility > for headaches. I don't think it is *bad* idea, but I also don't think it is *necessary*. But there are other people in the Racket group who think this is totally necessary for Planet 2. I'll let them explain why. Jay -- Jay McCarthy <j...@cs.byu.edu> Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay "The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93 _________________________ Racket Developers list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev
