Re: [Chicken-users] Chicken/egg version mismatch

[felix winkelmann]

On 10/16/05, Peter Bex <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> In the end I simply packaged Chicken 2.2, so I got it working, but what
> bothered me was: what do you do when you need a production box really fast,
> and you try to install eggs using an older version of Chicken?
> It's not always possible to update the package for your OS.
> The easiest thing one would normally do is download an older version of
> the egg (in this case, the Spiffy version that worked for Chicken 1.89).

Yes, this is a known problem.

>
> There should be some way to match the version of the egg you're downloading
> to the version of Chicken you're using.  In some circumstances you need or
> want to be able to download an older version of the egg.  Another solution
> would be to offer all previous versions as download for chicken-setup and
> the eggs' webpages.

I propose keeping ar archive of old eggs, served via http. Since you can
fetch eggs directly via an HTTP url with chicken-setup, one can retrieve
and install the desired version. Finding out which version is needed for
your particular chicken-installation is the hard part... but this can be handled
by mentioning the required chicken version in the egg-documentation.

>
> I'm not sure I have a *real* solution to this problem yet.  I suspect this
> can get pretty hairy, especially if you consider that in this case you also
> need to make sure that eggs tell Chicken what egg-version they need from their
> dependencies so chicken-setup will auto-download the correct versions of 
> those.

The automatic retrieval simply fetches the newest eggs, and this should
stay that way. There has been a lot of trouble recently, mainly due to
fundamental changes in the base system (and carelessness on my side).
I hope to slow down the development of new features for Chicken,
concentrating on bug-fixes, and performance- and stability enhancements.
The eggs will be put into a subversion repository real soon now, to make
it easier to submit patches and also to access older versions.

>
> Also: What happened to update-egg?  I found out that there have been some
> changes to Chicken's infrastructure, especially to the highlevel macro
> system.  For this, I needed to update an egg of mine, but I couldn't submit
> it using update-egg.

I was unable to keep track of new eggs, so please send any changes to me.
Once we have the subversion repository and the needed infrastructure in place
(automatic update of the main egg-site at call/cc.org), things should be
much simpler.


cheers,
felix