This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 83 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 83 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
Michael Sperber wrote:
You guys aren't digging what this SRFI is, I think: It's a *distribution format*. The idea is that you send this stuff to your friends or download it from somewhere, and then let your Scheme implementation slurp it into its package library or whatever, possibly (and probably) translating it into a format more suitable for its internal processing.
And then after I edit it, I have to use a different tool to unslurp it and send it back. And when I maintain it in CVS (in the portable distribution format, because it isn't implementation-specific), I have two have copies on my disk, and my 'make' scripts have to be careful to keep them in synch, and I have to be careful to not edit the wrong copy. The pragmatics of this model seem really bad.
I don't expect PLT Scheme or Chez or Scheme 48 to change their module systems much or to stop developing new ones as a result of this SRFI---rather I expect that their authors will implement "translators" from and to the distribution format specified here.
This is admitting defeat: We don't need to come up with a practical module system because it's only meant for distribution. Come on - we can do better than that. The key concept is "source code" - the "preferred human-readable format for studying and modifying programs" (to paraphrase the FSF by memory). That is what we need to standardize. Trying to standardize a distribution format as anything except a collection of source code units is something you worry about *after* you've standardized the source code format. If you want a distribution format, build on one of the standards: zip or (compressed) tar or MIME. -- --Per Bothner per@xxxxxxxxxxx http://per.bothner.com/