Re: [Chicken-hackers] Made a start with CHICKEN 5 proposal

[Mario Domenech Goulart]

Hi gentlemen,

On Mon, 8 Sep 2014 22:57:02 +0200 Peter Bex <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 04, 2014 at 12:44:54AM +0200, Felix Winkelmann wrote:
>
>> So, in short: forget about unicode, the full numeric tower,
>> chicken-install, port-refactoring and everything but modularization,
>> the internal structure (and size!) and the necessary issues of doing a
>> major release (e.g. the question of how to integrate that with
>> henrietta.)
>
> I think we can do minor things to make changing things in a backwards-
> compatible way.  These are important to postpone the need to "break the
> world" a third time as much as possible.
>
> I'd really like to hear other people's ideas about what would be the
> best way to integrate the changes with Henrietta.  Personally, I think
> the easiest way is to simply deploy a second copy of henrietta which
> reads from a different cache, populated by a second henrietta-cache cron
> job which reads from a different master list.

I think that approach sounds good.  We'd have /release/5/egg-locations
in svn and a new henrieta-cache instance would use it to populate a
separate cache.  We'd need a CHICKEN 5-specific henrietta providing an
URI for CHICKEN 5 eggs (chicken-install 5 would use that URI).

What is not clear to me is how to manage the egg repositories to work
with both CHICKEN 4 and 5.  We'll certainly have to maintain egg code
for CHICKEN 4 until CHICKEN 5 really catches.  During this period, how
will egg authors manage their egg repositories?  How will egg authors
specify "this egg version is for CHICKEN N" in the source repository (by
branching, I suppose).  And how to manage versions?

Will we be able to get along with changes by simply cond-expand'ing
against chicken-5?

Assuming egg authors won't create new repositories for their eggs for
CHICKEN 5, the henrietta-cache instance for CHICKEN 5 would still cache
versions that are only compatible with CHICKEN 4, although they will be
only meant to be used by CHICKEN 5.  I think that's not a really serious
issue, but I thought it should be mentioned, just in case somebody tries
"chicken-install5 <egg>:<version-for-chicken-4>".  We can work around
that by providing .release-info files specific to CHICKEN 5 (e.g., in a
chicken-5 branch), containing the versions compatible with CHICKEN 5
only.  Maybe there are better options?

Best wishes.
Mario
-- 
http://parenteses.org/mario