Re: CPAN-type thing: specifications, wishes, thoughts?

[CRLF0710]

Something like the Planets of Racket-lang? Should be able to install
offline, though~

2011/4/18 Noah Lavine <address@hidden>:
> Hello all,
>
> I'm afraid this email is coming much later in the planning process
> than it should, and quite possibly we won't be able to do any of this
> for SoC, and that's fine with me. But I was thinking about what we
> could do that would be a "killer feature" for Guile's CPAN - something
> that isn't already done by apt-get, dorodango, and every other package
> manager. One answer is that having a big collection of Guile packages
> *is* a killer feature, but we could have an apt repository of those if
> we wanted one.
>
> I think the answer is that the killer feature for a large repository
> of packages is having the ability to painlessly bundle a piece of
> software you've been writing and all of its dependencies in one
> easy-to-install thing for users. After all, it's easy when you're
> developing on your own machine to download a bunch of packages and use
> them to do whatever you need to do, but if you then want to send that
> to other people, you've got to collect the source code (or at least
> .go files) for all of them, put them in a folder, make sure the
> load-path will work out, and then most importantly, do all of that
> again every time a new version of one of your dependencies comes out.
> I think the feature that is missing is the ability to say "take my
> software and package it so that its only external dependency is
> POSIX", or something similar.
>
> The implementation of such a thing isn't especially deep, but I bet
> there will be a lot of little things that need to be done just right
> for it to work. I think this could be a part of a package manager that
> also does the other things Paul was listing.
>
> How does this idea sound?
>
> Noah
>
> On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 11:01 PM, Paul Raccuglia <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Hi. Since the idea of creating something like CPAN is something folks
>> wants, I figure it would be good to collect as many thoughts and
>> information as possible in one place.
>>
>> (I'd also appreciate links to relevant threads)
>>
>> My thoughts, specifically, were for the client to be fairly similar in
>> function to apt-get. (from the user's perspective)
>> The core commands would be:
>>
>> INSTALL package_name   -- queries a server (set in configuration
>> files), gets an absolute link to the package, and a list of
>> dependencies. Downloads the package, and then any dependencies, and
>> takes care of unpacking, verifying, compiling, storing, etc. anything
>> that needs to be done. The package would have to have meta-data
>> attached in some fashion.
>>
>> REMOVE package_name -- just has to remove all the relevant files, and
>> clean up any references to the package in the storage system. May want
>> to check dependencies and alert the user.
>>
>> UPDATE [package_name] -- could be called to check all packages (by not
>> specifying a package name) or to update a specific package. Warn the
>> user of any dependencies that could be broken.
>>
>> My thought was that the package manager could, itself, be a package
>> (but, hopefully, one that would be included by default). I wouldn't
>> imagine that the current code base would need to be modified a whole
>> lot.
>>
>> I was thinking that most of this project could be written in Guile.
>> Does that make sense?
>>
>> Some thoughts I heard were:
>> using stowfs to handle storing the packages intelligently
>> use dorodango to handle most of the acquisition
>>
>>
>> For the server design:
>> I was envisioning a website to navigate packages (like
>> http://packages.debian.org/stable/). My thought is to do everything
>> over HTTP (seems like that would work well with Dorodango). Doesn't
>> seem like a hugely complicated issue?
>>
>> Questions about the server:
>> How would the central repository be maintained? Give trusted
>> developers the ability to make changes to their personal packages at
>> will?
>> How will packages be nominated / selected for inclusion?
>>
>>
>> That's all I can think of, right now. I'm sure there's more but I want
>> to start a discussion. Thanks,
>> Paul R
>>
>>
>
>



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