Re: [Chicken-users] Arch User Repository packages

[Matt Gushee]

Actually, upon further reflection, I think my previous post was a bit
confused. The reasons I gave were surely valid reasons for
*something*, but maybe not for the points I was making ;-) What I
really want to say is that:

* I believe that in some hypothetical future where people are
developing end-user applications in Chicken Scheme, not just the
applications but all their runtime dependencies, typically including a
number of eggs, should be made available as packages for Arch (or
whatever flavor of) Linux - for all the usual reasons we have packages
and libraries to begin with. Although an AUR package doesn't provide
much benefit in and of itself (it has to be compiled either way, and
chicken-install is very easy to use), I imagine the developer is
hoping the application will eventually be accepted into the official
repo; at least I would, if I were the developer. And at that point not
just the app but all its dependencies will need to be available as
binary packages.

* On the other hand, as long as the only purpose for the egg packages
is to provide libraries for developers, I would agree that it is a
waste of time to package them. Let developers just use
chicken-install.

And consequently, I will *not* be thinking about how to automate
AUR-packages-from-eggs. Hope that doesn't break anyone's heart.

--
Matt Gushee

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 8:21 PM, John Cowan <address@hidden> wrote:
> Matt Gushee scripsit:
>
>> Also, in my experience with various Linux tribes, there is a general
>> expectation that binary packages should depend only on other binary
>> packages. Indeed, there is a potential security issue in that (at
>> least in principle) official binary packages are tested and
>> security-audited by the dev team of any given distribution, so
>> allowing a package to install other software outside the
>> distribution's procedures would be frowned upon if not prohibited in
>> most distributions.
>
> Sure.  But in that case it is the business of the OS-specific packager
> to ensure the appropriate dependencies are provided in an OS-specific
> manager.  Chicken by itself has no way to specify, except in prose,
> what the non-Chicken dependencies of any given egg are, because there
> are no universal names for these dependencies.
>
> --
> John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        address@hidden
>         Sound change operates regularly to produce irregularities;
>         analogy operates irregularly to produce regularities.
>                 --E.H. Sturtevant, ca. 1945, probably at Yale