Re: [Scheme-reports] Reformulated numeric-tower ballot

[John Cowan <cowan@x>]

Sascha Ziemann scripsit:

> Instead it would be much more important to specify some kind of Maven
> like package repository for Scheme. There have been several attempts,
> but Racket has its own, Chicken has its own, Gamit has its own. And
> if you try to switch from one Scheme to another, it is always a pain
> to find the packages necessary for the program. Not having access to
> package repositories is nowadays a major productivity drawback.

Indeed:  see <http://trac.sacrideo.us/wg/wiki/Snow> for Alex Shinn's
proposal in that direction.  There are two problems: there is no
central meta-repository (a true central repository is probably too much
cat-herding to expect), and the names of packages aren't standardized.
Part of R7RS-large is to get those standard names at least for a
reasonable set of packages.

Note that this will only work (for some values of "work") for packages
with portable implementations.  What is more, the old quip about
standards applies: you have N repositories, you set up a standard, now
you have (+ N 1) repositories.  And if you don't like any of them, wait
till next year!

> If R7RS wants to be large/great, it should do something great.
> And joining all Scheme code would be the greatest thing R7RS could do.

I'll settle for being large.  I don't think that "great" is a target to
aim at directly, any more than "beautiful" is.  We like beautiful code,
and we do things to help our code be beautiful, but we don't think "Hey,
I'll write something beautiful today."  (Painters don't do that either.)

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan@x
You know, you haven't stopped talking since I came here. You must
have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.
        --Rufus T. Firefly

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