Re: a couple of vn-cclan package procedure questions

[btw, Miles, I've just uploaded your new packages. Thanks!  Sorry it's
later than I'd planned on doing them]

Miles Egan <[email protected]> writes:

> 1. Should we assimilate parts of clocc?
> 2. How should vn-cclan packages be named?

I think our desired end state should be, where possible, that upstream
package authors (or maintainers) take on the .asd files and maintain
them themselves - whether or not they then want the package to appear
in cclan.  I would encourage package authors to

1) package in .asd format,
2) create a cclan page with the same name
3) that has an appropriate download link 

then they can keep their packages anywhere they like provided they
tell cliki where it is, and the cclan network itself is a value add
for people without the ability and/or inclination to host their own
files.

Repositories of converted packages (e.g. aptable debian archives)
could be based either on the cclan repository, or could suck in all
the packages from the rest of the net with a well-placed cliki search
(there is shortly to be a new cliki search syntax which will allow
this stuff)

OK, so how does this relate to your actual questions?  

> 1. Should we assimilate parts of clocc?

If and only if you want to maintain them, or you can persuade the
upstream (the clocc maintainer, or perhaps where contactable the
original author) to absorb and keep hold of the asd system definition.
My guess is that clocc maintainers will probably not want to do this
as I think they've standardised on mk-defsystem.  Upstream upstream
people might though, possibly.  If they're still around.

For stuff which never changes (pgutils being a good example),
"maintain" is essentially a no-op task, so I don't want to discourage
people from e.g. packaging the RT code or MEMOIZATION or anything like
that.

> 2. How should vn-cclan packages be named?

Ahaha.  There's historical forces involved here.

The ASDF System name is foo.asd.  With any luck it provides a CL
package called "FOO", but that doesn't necessarily follow.  I would
like a "vendor-independent package containing an ASDF system and
source files" (i.e. the tar files that were presently generating) to
have a name which can be mechanically generated from the system name
(and version) in some way.

When we did cclan 1 (the Debian version) we wanted to mark all our
library packages as being Lisp (a) to avoid name clashes with real
Debian packages, (b) to indicate to ordinary users that they wouldn't
do anything immediately useful on their own.  So we had cl-* in the
same way that debian development packages are all *-dev and Perl
libraries are all *-perl.  This didn't apply uniformly: "end-user"
applications that happen to be written in Lisp were just called by
their names.  So, langband not cl-langband, for example.

I don't think it makes sense to prepend cl- on the vendor-independent
packages any more than  it would make sense for all those CPAN
libraries to be called Net-Telnet-0.16-Perl.tar.gz

> There's already a couple of conventions in play in the current
> repository.  I'm not a big fan of the domain-style names (com.foo.bar)
> because they emphasize an ephemeral and non-descriptive property of
> the package.  CPAN seems to have gotten along great without them.

The domain-style names are another kettle of fish, actually, as (at
least in the case of net-telent-*) the ASDF system also has that name
- it's not just the tar file that got renamed.

The problem is that, for example, we potentially have three different
MD5 packages which probably have different APIs or performance
characteristics (Pierre Mai's, Fare's and one other whose provenance
currently escapes me) and will sooner or later need some method to
tell them apart.  If you think that CPAN has managed without this,
just try searching it for MIME packages and try to determine which
goes with what without looking at the readmes.

> common lisp.  Doing nothing to change the name of the package makes it
> hard to tell the original source distrubution apart from the asdf
> package (the names would be the same in most cases).  Is it too cheesy

The end goal is that there be no separate asdf package, so in that
case it wouldnt matter that they have the same name; they have the
same content too.  In the Real World(tm), though ...

> to give the packages simple but descriptive names and add an asd
> prefix or suffix, so that, for example:
>
> net-telent-date-1.0 -> asd-date-1.0.tar.gz or date-1.0.asd

No, but -

* I think we need to leave the tar.gz on, because asdf archive nodes
around the world will already know what content-type to serve tar.gz
as (or, depending on protocol used, asdf archive node _clients_ know 
how to guess it correctly)

* I think 'cclan' is probably a better affix (is that the right word?)
than 'asdf' for distinguishing changed-by-us packages from the originals

* I don't really mind if it goes on the start or on the end

These are my opinions: you can have them if you want.


-dan

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