Re: Re: Making ASDF-Install ASDF-Installable

On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 07:18:15PM +0100, Pascal Bourguignon wrote:
> It's not because it's upgradable that you have to upgrade it.
> But it's nice for installers to be self-upgradable.
> fink, and gentoo do this for example, and it works well and nice.

And CPAN does it too, which is nice when it works and almost insanely
stupid when it doesn't (e.g. when it decides to upgrade Perl as well)

asdf-install was originally intended to be small and as self-contained
as possible, so that it didn't need lots of external libraries
(because without something like, say, asdf-install, it's tedious to
install lots of external libraries).  If people are planning on
turning it into some all-singing all-dancing app which gets upgraded
regularly, they might want to think about arranging matters such that
asdf-install-mini is the bundled-with-cl-compiler variant which
contineus to be small and featureless, and asdf-install-maxi is the
actively-developed version with all the bells and whistles, which can
itself be asdf-installed.  Then at least if your upgrade of
asdf-install-maxi breaks then you can use the -mini version to get
yourself out of the hole without too much pain.  If you can think of
better names, that's a double win.

(Another feature for a-i-maxi that might be good is the ability to use
another redirector than CLiki, or even a list of redirectors (trying
each in succession).  Then it could be used by "distributions": people
setting up mini-clikis which point only at known-to-play-nice-together
versions of software packages)

I am guilty in this post of suggesting work for others to do, 
without any intention of doing it myself, for which I apologise.


-dan


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