On Dec 18, 5:46 am, Rich Hickey <richhic...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've cut a new release, 20081217, which is available from Google Code:
>
> http://clojure.googlecode.com/files/clojure_20081217.zip
Reading noob comments on this list, I suspect many people downloaded
the September Clojure tarball and tried (with mixed success) to get a
working development environment setup. Some would have given up on
Clojure while others would have learned that they were better off
using the development svn/git versions of things. However, the
development versions of libraries are not always stable so you can
potentially waste a lot of time trying to get a development
environment setup. Sure you can run Clojure from a command line or use
a lisp-ignorant text editor, but nobody is really going to do that for
very long. There are some "packaged" options that have been proposed
in the past ("Clojure Box" is one), but not everyone wants/needs
something like that either (many developers are happy to have just the
Clojure & Wiki setup instructions). However, all potential new Clojure
developers would almost certainly like to know that the packages that
they need to install will actually work together. Therefore, it might
be worthwhile to discuss a process whereby tarballs of "core Clojure-
related development libraries" that are known to work with a specific
release are saved off to a specific location (so that noob's can be
pointed to the latest set of files that are known to work together
instead of having to struggle with setting up multiple different
libraries that may or may not work properly together at any given
point in time). Currently, there are 4 key 3rd-party libraries that
most people need for developing Clojure code:
1. clojure-contrib
2. slime
3. clojure-mode
4. swank-clojure
(in the future, perhaps the Gorilla/Netbeans/Eclipse libs too;
however, maybe there won't be as many interdependent libraries and
potential for "breakage" with those)
For clojure-contrib, it would make sense to create a matching tarball
whenever a Clojure release occurs. For the other 3, it would be
necessary for someone to test and save off a copy of the libraries
somewhere (that by itself would make getting started with Clojure a
much easier task).
I'm not sure what the best way to manage this (the "where" and "who")
would be. One option would be to store files in the Clojure Google
Groups file area (although this could be a bit problematic since the
Google Groups file area isn't very "flexible" and everything is
jumbled in there together). Another option is to maintain the 3rd
party tarballs as separate "Featured" downloads in the clojure-contrib
Google Code Downloads area. I think the latter might make more sense
as it would keep "release-related" tarballs all in the clojure-contrib
project without actually "polluting" the clojure-contrib source
repository with foreign libraries. It would also provide "ownership"
of the process (assuming the clojure-contrib members are willing to
take this on).
Since the clojure_20081217.zip release is "pre-1.0", maybe we don't
need to do anything yet; however, it would be nice to come up with a
Clojure-community approach to deal with this issue in preparation for
a "post-1.0" world.
Thoughts?
--
Bill Clementson
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