From an app developer's point of view, I think Noel's reasoning is
this:
All of PLT is bundled together under one big version number. If you
upgrade the core, you upgrade all the satellite libraries as well.
This has three drawbacks:
- if you want to upgrade to a newer version of PLT for an
improvement in one library, you may have to deal with potential
backwards-incompatible changes in other libraries at the same time;
- compiling all of PLT can be slow;
- other software you have developed may still use older versions of
PLT.
PLaneT offers a little more flexibility: to a certain degree you can
choose to upgrade one dependency independently of the rest.
In other words, if Noel makes a change to Schemeunit, and a developer
is requiring it from the core, he/she will have to update all of PLT
at the same time, which might take a while and make upgrading
difficult. If, however, the developer is requiring Schemeunit from
PLaneT, they should hopefully be able to just upgrade that one library
and leave everything else as-is.
Cheers,
-- Dave
Noel, I don't understand this response at all. Could you elaborate?
In the past we have deprecated planet package when we moved code
into the core. -- Matthias
Dependency management. We've been bitten by changes in the web server
stopping us upgrading PLT to get bug fixes in other areas. Now
SchemeUnit isn't as likely to change as the web server, but why make
the dependency if you can avoid it? (This only applies if you aren't
developing core code. If you are, use the core version.)
N.
Why recommend the planet version over the core version?
Robby
_________________________________________________
For list-related administrative tasks:
http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-dev
