Every few months, the principals of the Racket world meet for a day to discuss the state and near (and, occasionally, distant) future of the Racket world. We met on the weekend of December 5 in Dunstable, MA, and here is the list of major points we discussed.
1. Contributions and Software Freedom Conservancy Our application to the Software Freedom Conservancy, which would help us to accept tax-deductible contributions, is still pending. Meanwhile, we will prepare PLT Design Inc. to accept income, so that we can also support other means of (non-tax-deductible) contributions and to manage RacketCon. 2. Package maintainers When package creators become unable to continue as maintainers, sometimes a package name needs to be reallocated to a repository where a new maintainer has control. In his role as the curator at pkgs.racket-lang.org, Jay has been reallocating package names as necessary, but we'd like to make the process more transparent. Jay will start announcing these transitions on the dev list. Longer term, pkgs.racket-lang.org should provide an interface for these announcements, discussion, and history. We'd also like to build up a better culture and tool support for documenting a library's internals. We need to discuss this more, but we have one idea for now: code walk-throughs in the form of video recordings. Jay will recruit presenters and arrange recordings. 3. Backwards compatibility and adding library exports Although our general policy on package updates is that they should be backward-compatible, we make a significant exception for the case of adding exports to an existing library. Adding an export mostly works out, but it's not backward-compatible, because it can create conflicts in existing code. Recent technical changes have lessened the effect of conflicts, and we can take one more technical step: make import conflicts an error only if the conflicting identifier is actually used. Matthew will try that change. At the same time, we'd like to refine the policy on adding exports: it's ok to add a new export as long as it doesn't create a conflict for any code that is registered on pkgs.racket-lang.org. To support this policy, Robby will set up snapshot-based package build, which will complement the release-based package build at pkg-build.racket-lang.org, and Jay will update pkgs.racket-lang.org to have a new column that shows results with the snapshot. 4. Release-time testing Our release testing process seems to have gotten slower as release-time testers struggle to find time for their checklist items. Also, the process of posting the checklist and responses to the dev list is not working well for people who try to keep track of the release state. To address the latter problem, we're moving the checklist to a wiki page. To help with the former problem, we're expanding the checklist to contain more information about how each check is performed, so that others who have time around a given release will be able to help check off items. A related issue is that examples in the documentation sometimes fail in a way that indicates a bug. By having that failure be a documentation-build failure, instead of rendered as an error message in the documentation, we can avoid some errors in a release. Matthew will add a replacement for `examples` where forms that are intended to be rendered as errors must be explicitly marked as such, while other errors trigger a document failure. 5. docs.racket-lang.org Currently, docs.racket-lang.org shows only documentation that's included in the distribution for the most recent release. The plan has always been to push documentation for package builds there, so that documentation for all packages is searchable in a single place. Matthew will make that switch soon. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-dev/56749984.64c7420a.69b74.2c39SMTPIN_ADDED_MISSING%40gmr-mx.google.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
