Re: [Chicken-hackers] Egg plan for 5?

[Dan Leslie]

Is there documentation on how to construct an egg file? I've been
looking at this [0] document and it's not clear to me what the new
format looks like.

Many of my setup files included a significant amount of code execution,
particularly using the make egg, and I see that this is under
consideration for either sandboxing or complete removal. I'm not sure
what to say here other than I'm eager to start on converting to 5 in
order to overcome these changes sooner rather than later.

I'm hopeful that the namespace changes are going to make it easier for
Geiser to operate. Right now it's a bit clumsy about modules and their
exports.

0: https://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-5-roadmap-egg-system

Thanks!
-Dan

On Sat, 30 Dec 2017 20:13:20 +0100
Peter Bex <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 09:47:22AM -0800, Dan Leslie wrote:
> > Ah, thank-you! 
> > 
> > Regarding dropping in a new release-info: wouldn't backwards
> > compatibility be preserved for existing releases if one were using
> > git tags? Those previous releases ought to continue to exist in the
> > git repository. Is the issue that the original release-info will no
> > longer be tracked, and if so, I'm a little confused: am I to
> > understand that the Chicken 4 repository and Chicken 5 repository
> > are mutually exclusive?  
> 
> Well, it's technically possible to make an egg that will build on
> either CHICKEN 4 or CHICKEN 5 by using both a .setup file (CHICKEN 4)
> and a .egg file (CHICKEN 5), with some cond-expand magic to paper
> over the differences, but I expect that would be too much hassle for
> most egg authors.
> 
> In any case, an old release of an egg certainly will not work
> unmodified on CHICKEN 5, so you'd need to omit those old CHICKEN
> 4-only releases from the release-info you're using for CHICKEN 5.
> 
> > As it is, it sounds like moving off having releases in `master` and
> > towards encouraging egg authors to use major Chicken version
> > specific branches to track releases is the way to go, in the very
> > long term.  
> 
> If I understand you correctly, yes, that would make life easier in the
> long run.  But it won't help much today.  And I don't know how long it
> will take until CHICKEN 6 will be released (probably many years), so I
> don't see a point in preparing for that already.
> 
> > If all of my eggs were tracked in major version branches already
> > then this new release wouldn't be much of an issue! :D  
> 
> Indeed.
> 
> Cheers,
> Peter