Re: package management

On Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:24:28 +0100, Edi Weitz wrote:

On Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:38:17 +0200, Kamen TOMOV <kamen@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Yeah, but I don't think it's very different from, say, managing Perl
libraries or something similar. You either trust that some external
entity (the Debian guys, the Lisp developers who cater to ASDF-INSTALL,
the CPAN guys, whoever) will make sure all the libraries you need are
automatically installed (in the right version) or you don't.

Note that:

1. "the CPAN guys" don't really exist as a coordinated group at all. It's
just that CPAN modules have some mechanisms to specify minimum versions
of their required libraries, so outdated modules will get automatically
updated if you install a library that depends on a newer version (which
is pretty limited, but seems to work most of the time, for modules that
are still under active development/maintenance).

As far as I can see there's no version management for asdf-install at all
or at least the packages I've looked at don't seem to specify any version
requirements (though I may be wrong, please correct me if so).

2. Even with CPAN, which is on avarage a pretty big success (and
certainly one of the biggest reasons I use perl), you may not want to mix
it with any other package management system (like debian's archives). For
perl I prefer to have a system perl managed via debian packages so that
all debian packages that rely on perl will work provided the maintainer
is awake, and a completely separate perl that I maintain myself, mostly
via the CPAN installer, with additional packages installed "manually"
that I use to develop my own software. This can be done fairly easily on
debian by installing your "own" perl and its dependancies in /usr/local
and installing local packages using the local perl.

I've come
to a point where I have /one/ directory which contains all of the Lisp
libraries I use (including my own) and I update them when needed, either
from a release tarball or from some version control mechanism. I don't
use ASDF-INSTALL, and on my Debian boxes I don't use the Debian package
system for Lisp libraries.

Currently I'm tending towards this system too. But that's mostly because
I've found asdf-install to be unreliable. Currently I just use asdf-
install first and if that doens't work I remove/re-install the things
that don't work in ~/.sbcl/site etc. I would love to have asdf-install
work at least as well as perl's CPAN/CPANPLUS shells.

Joost
.

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