On Aug 13, 2009, at 9:43 AM, Marco Maggi wrote:
... My experience with Python packages (disclaimer: it's been a while ago) is that they are hard to use, above the "why not" level; I am no Python programmer and having to learn some Python and yet another package management tool just to try out an application is too much, so I end up not trying it.
My experience with CPAN (and it's been a while ago) is that it works like charm. Debian's APT tools also work like charm and takes probably all of 2 minutes to learn (do apt-get install foobar and you're set, 99% of the time).
I speak only for Linux, here. I have built some experience with the Slackware package management, and given a tarball using the "normal" configure+make+make install procedure I can embed it quickly in my small infrastructure of shell scripts, which allows me to create a Slackware package and use it with no problems.
I would say most people don't have this experience. Most, if not all, Scheme libraries and programs do not require the configure/make/make install procedure. It also does not take care of the mundane tasks of locating the packing, fetching it, unpacking in a temp directory, reading the INSTALL file, etc. It also does not deal with upgrading, conflicts, etc. It also does not work on Windows. Simply, it's just not even close to being an ideal situation.
With Python packages I was not even able to install in a temporary directory, without diving in documentation I was not eager to read (I gave up).
Hmmm. I don't have much experience with Python, but it's usually "python setup.py install --prefix <dir>" or something like that.
It took me some time to learn Slackware packages and become comfortable with them (and they are maybe the simplest), so why should I be forced not to use them? The system is mine! :-)
No one is saying you cannot use what you're comfortable with. For most people, including myself, I want something as simple as APT that takes care of everything for me 99% of the time. Say, if Eduardo says he has a nice demo in package foobar, I just want to do "spkg install foobar" to get it running, and not go to github, copy the command line, paste it into the terminal, see how he structured his code to figure out how to add it to the library path, etc., all of that just to get a simple demo running (and I'm not picking on Eduardo here of course).
When I started with Lisp I tried Common Lisp. Knowing almost nothing of the language, and with no experience of CL's REPL, I tried to install some package with ASDF. I failed, and it was really frustrating.
So, we should make something better, right?
Whenever I see someone starting a repository, my heart feels sadness.
Me too, but, so what?
I have seen some efforts fail, simply because developers were not using them; the final result was a waste of resources, probably with little or no lateral reward for the maintainer in terms of new stuff learned and such.
If only a few people use it to achieve some task, it's worth the effort. The goal is not to take over the world, it's just to make our lives a little better. *I* and many others have a need for this, and if someone doesn't need it, they don't have to use it. End of the story.
A *lot* of work is needed to maintain such an infrastructure.
I think starting simple should not take that much work. As I said in the previous message, I estimate it would take a week (that's ~40~60 hacking hours once we settle on some sort of a spec) to get something going. Plus, we'd make some reusable libraries in the process. It's not *that* bad! Aziz,,,
