keeping packages and versions accessible

[Neil Van Dyke]

Any ideas for ensuring that all "released versions" of non-core Racket
packages in the new package system remain accessible (short-term, and
long-term)?

Ideas other than the current ad-hoc people individually
copying&preserving the versions that they use or anticipate someday
using (which, incidentally, tends to result in lazy copy&paste&modify,
rather than shared reusable components).

And, ideas other than "just use github". (Though one could make some
pragmatic arguments for that, but I'm interested in alternatives.)

One idea is for the "packages.racket-lang.org" server to double as a
server of all current and past versions of packages, like was done for
PLaneT.

Neil V.

[Jay McCarthy]

There are no plans for the Racket maintainers to host package sources,
binaries, or histories for any packages that are not required by the
main-distribution package. (And even for those, we do not host sources
(we use Github) and we do not store arbitrary histories, just
releases.)

Package catalogs (such as pkgs.racket-lang.org) only store references
to packages stored elsewhere. Among other things, this promotes
flexibility, decentralizes work, and insulates us from an licensing
and copyright issues.

We encourage all package authors to use long-lived hosting of all
versions. The use of Git (whether a personal server, Github,
Bitbucket, etc) automatically provides historical versions. We welcome
submission of pull requests to add support for Mercurial or other
similar repositories. If both of these are not possible for you for
some reason, the package API supports HTTP-accessible directories, so
you can just have a directory of files on a site somewhere. (For
instance, the main-distribution packages are served on such a
directory hosted by Amazon S3.)

We have no plans to disallow or otherwise censure packages that don't
do this. However, we expect that the free access to multiple options
(Github & Bitbucket) will be its own encouragement of this activity.

If someone in the community would like to start their own site to
store old versions, we have no comment on their activity and will
consider pull requests that make their job easier.

Jay

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--
Jay McCarthy
Associate Professor
PLT @ CS @ UMass Lowell
http://jeapostrophe.github.io

"Wherefore, be not weary in well-doing,
for ye are laying the foundation of a great work.
And out of small things proceedeth that which is great."
- D&C 64:33

[Neil Van Dyke]

Thanks for the response, Jay.

Jay McCarthy wrote on 12/07/2015 08:38 AM:
> If someone in the community would like to start their own site to
> store old versions, we have no comment on their activity and will

Should the person, or any member of their IM force, be captured or
killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of their actions.

I think doing this sufficiently well in a way that is not both
officially supported and part of the default third-party package process
is too much work, so I'm abandoning the idea.