On Aug 13, 2009, at 10:06 AM, Abdulaziz Ghuloum wrote:
On Aug 13, 2009, at 9:33 AM, Abdulaziz Ghuloum wrote:
Question: can we use the debian tools (dpkg, apt-get, etc.) as
is to accomplish the task?
I think I vote against this. It's probably not simple to use for
developers and may not be easy to install (e.g., on Windows) and
may be hard to interoperate with from Scheme. We can copy the
interesting bits though.
You guys have hit a nerve and so I delurk..
I hate the process of building dpkg packages. I don't want to say
more, my views are documented all over the web for those who want to
google ;-) The best Linux packaging systems I've worked with are Arch
Linux's Pacman and Conary, but I don't think any of these systems is
the right thing for a cross platform library management system,
they're all designed to solve a different, though related, problem.
As you point out the pain of getting apt (or conary, or pacman, or..
ad infinitum) up and running on every system that could support Ikarus
is too big a barrier, not just for Windows and Mac but for every other
linux distro that has a different packaging system. Conversely most
linux distros have worked out ways to make there packing systems
interact with existing library management tools (ASDF, Ruby Gems,
CPAN, etc..) there's no reason that a similarly modeled system for
Ikarus or all R6RS schemes wouldn't work.
Chicken Scheme has a nice system called Eggs that I really liked when
I was using it a couple of years back, PLT has it's Planet stuff as
well. Maybe these would be a better starting point?
I do agree with the original point that making RPMs and DPKG packages
from libraries via this system would be a useful feature and certainly
help to get Ikarus included in more distros, especially if the
coverage was 100% and even when the package wasn't in the official
repository for the distro you could grab it from the R6RS repository.
--
Geoff Teale
<[email protected]>
