At Wed, 29 May 2013 14:14:11 -0400, Eli Barzilay wrote: > * Does this split actually work wrt having no circular dependencies?
It's mostly non-circular, but there are some exceptions. I think there are no circularities among the "-lib" packages, but I'm not 100% certain. The existing "-docs" packages are probably all ultimately mutually dependent. That's not all documentation, though, and there are still some unresolved links; maybe we want to add more dependencies, or maybe we want to use the experimental "indirect" options for section and module-name references. I should just write a program to draw the graph. > * I usually like the fine split to packages like -docs and -lib. > However, minor subpoints: > > - Shouldn't the "-docs" suffix be "-doc" to be in-line with the > directory name and also symmetric to "-lib"? (BTW, looking at the > Fedora installations that I have, there are both conventions, but > "-doc" is much more common than "-docs" , and "-libs" is a little > more common than "-lib".) > - I think that a -lib package is for cases where there is some use > for it by itself, and in some cases there's no need for that. > Things that I've seen: > - "xrepl-lib" -- there's no library functionality in xrepl that is > useful by itself, and if there is (or if something does become > useful), then it should move out of it. > > - "at-exp-lib" -- the "lib" in the name seems confusing (because > there is no "at-exp", and I don't think that it's right to have > a "-lib"-only package...) > But I was confused: > > - Also, I'm looking at the "draw" package (and now that I see it, > "xrepl" too), and it looks like a hack that is compensating for > an inability to specify some "doc of" relation between packages. > (It's useful to have meta-packages, of course, it just looks like > the wrong level to specify such relationships.) The fact that I > was confused about it seems to support this... > > - I'm also worried about the repo-implications of such splittage: > would there actually be three repositories for "foo", "foo-doc", > and "foo-lib"? If so, then the price of not having in-package > specification for these things seem much higher; I will certainly > not want to see three such repos for xrepl... > > - There are also some "-lib" packages (like string-constants-lib) > that have no other forms. (Especially in the string-constant > thing, having it be a -lib seems wrong to me.) > > - Similar issues are going to be relevant for other "package kinds" > like "-typed". (The following sentence written after I've seen > much more:) So the more I see these things, the more I think that > it's bad to rely or encourage on this kind of post-pended suffix > as an indication of the package type -- I'd rather see these > things more formal and hopefully all distributable from within a > single per-real-package repository instead of an extra > meta-package for each. Well, I agree with all these thoughts, but what's the conclusion? There's no requirement that packages be in multiple repositories, but different packages in a single repository currently have to be different subdirectories in the repository. Do we need (or do we really want) a notion of "subpackages" to support some general form of splitting within a package? [You had *lots* of comments about specific packages --- which are certainly welcome, but let's tackle the big picture, first.] _________________________ Racket Developers list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev