As one of those people on the periphery, wanted to share some feedback. I hope it's not so high-level that it's vague and annoying.
1. Racket has a wonderful story about simple installation. On Windows, Mac, Linux, you download one file, run it, and it's all set up and good to go in < 1 minute. (Plus there's this amazing IDE, DrRacket.) In my limited experience the story is not as wonderful with some more-popular languages. Which is fortunate; ideally the barrier to trying Racket should be lower. For many users, a monolithic(ish) simple install will remain a wonderful thing. As best I understand, the proposal isn't to get rid of that, instead it's to supplement it with more options. If so, (a) great! And (b), this may still be tricky because we wouldn't want that _message_ to get obscured when announcing the new, more sophisticated thing. (In commercial software marketing I've seen companies want to emphasize new features, to the detriment of telling the basic story which is still fresh and compelling for new users (just not to existing users, or to the sales/marketing guys who are getting bored with it). Although that concern may be unwarranted, here, I wanted to point out the potential gotcha.) 2. The new package system has already proven to be an easier experience for third party package authors like me. That is great -- thank you! 3. As a very infrequent contributor to Racket, I'm just sort of waiting for the dust to settle with respect to Git repo (repos??) and build process, at which point I'll be eager to contribute again. 3(a) Speaking of which, I think there is some backlog of pull requests on GitHub. Would it be simpler to to accept any more of these before the source layout universe changes, or too much to deal with so punt until later? (I don't know either way, just wanted to point it out.) _________________________ Racket Developers list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev
