On Fri, 2009-08-14 at 11:04 +0200, Göran Weinholt wrote: > Abdulaziz Ghuloum <[email protected]> writes: > > > I suggest, for now, that the version of a package be a string > > containing dot-separated list of nonnegative exact integers > > (e.g., "1.2.3.4"). These have all the good characteristics: > > easy for humans to understand, easy for programs to process, > > and above all, extremely boring so that no one would have any > > interest in arguing over the merits of one versioning scheme > > over the next. > > > > Any serious objections? (I hope not) > > I have a tentative objection to everything you're discussing. You're > building a system with package names, versions and dependencies, but the > R6RS already has all that. Where do they figure in?
R6RS's versioning-in-library-names is complicated to the point of being flawed [1], unfortunately. I really wish versioning could be reasonably done with library names and imports, but the complication/flaw is intrinsic. So, if we're going to have versioning which supports version constraints and multiple available versions (which of course is very desirable) and which works "fully generally" (i.e. for all possibilities) (which seems absolutely necessary to me), I currently think it must be done outside library names/imports. Aziz and I analyzed R6RS's versioning and it sure seemed unworkable. But maybe it can be reasonably implemented and used, and if so I support using it because saying what version you want at the same place as what library you want would be ideal, and I'd very much like to see a complete detailed specification of how to make it work (I already tried and failed), before we do completely give up on it. Even if R6RS's versioning can be made workable, a package installer/manager is still going to want to know what versions to fetch and which ones it is managing, and so it's going to be involved with versions of packages. But how this relates to versioning of individual libraries, especially for a package which is a framework of multiple libraries, I have no idea either. [1] http://groups.google.com/group/ikarus-users/msg/8392014ed8902e4c [CC'ing Michael Sperber because I think he's interested in this issue of R6RS library versioning.] -- : Derick ----------------------------------------------------------------
