Re: [Chicken-users] Wish list

[Stephen Eilert]

On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 3:36 PM, Aleksej Saushev <address@hidden> wrote:

  Hello,

I have talked to a user, and he reminded me of my past experience of
using Chicken in production environment around four years ago. While
many things improved since then, there're still some I'd like to have.

1. Distribute eggs by HTTP(S) and/or FTP(S).

Today I have "chicken-install -r", but it still is a specialized client.
I don't quite understand what I can do if I'm in mildly hostile network
where automatically configured proxy requires authentication mechanism
chicken-install doesn't support.

I have added some support for http proxies to chicken-install a long time ago. It does not support HTTP authentication, but it shouldn't be more than a couple of hours of work to add the required support. It would be trivial to add, except that chicken-install cannot itself rely on eggs to perform the work.

I am no longer inside a proxy, so the motivation for doing that evaporated. How many people are using Chicken behind corporate proxies?

 

4. Support installation of eggs into directory other than
$(chicken-install -repository).

It would be nice to be able to install eggs into private area
(for testing purposes, for migration purposes, just as developer
convenience, whatever).

This is supported already as others have pointed out, it's just not the default.

My opinion is that the default repository should live under the current user's home directory (.chicken ?), so that no super-user permissions are necessary for installing eggs on development machines. Deployment setups could use a system-wide repo, as desired, or even bundle eggs with the deployed application. This would even allow multiple chicken versions to co-exist in the same machine (which is already possible, but requires some environment variable magic).

-- Stephen