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

[Andreas Rottmann]

Noah Lavine <address@hidden> writes:

> 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.
>
Well, IIRC, it's not a feature that "dorodango does not have" ;-):
dordango's package container format (referred to as a "bundle") can
contain multiple packages.  So it is possible to pack all your
dependencies in a single ZIP, and install them in one go using that
bundle.  There's a bit of text about that in the dorodango manual, but
here is how it works practically:

% doro show-bundle my-app.zip # to view packages in the bundle
% doro install --bundle=my-app-full.zip my-app # install my-app and all 
dependencies

> 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.
>
Support for this has to be present in the conception of the
package/bundle format, so indeed it's important that taking this feature
into account from the beginning.

> I think this could be a part of a package manager that also does the
> other things Paul was listing.
>
Indeed!

Regards, Rotty
-- 
Andreas Rottmann -- <http://rotty.yi.org/>