From: Jonas Bernoulli <jonas@bernoul.li>
To: Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com>
Cc: Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>,
Yuan Fu <casouri@gmail.com>, emacs-devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: Unboxed package manager
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2023 12:17:13 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87lejprq6e.fsf@bernoul.li> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAM=F=bDSF_soMsi49WmW840YzjG+3RJQO_5ViH9yTcCeZ2B1KQ@mail.gmail.com>
Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com> writes:
> On Mon, Mar 20, 2023 at 2:11 PM Jonas Bernoulli <jonas@bernoul.li> wrote:
>>
>> Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> > I think I'm going to hack something together starting with advice on the
>> > existing package management and taking some inspiration from the design of
>> > Jonas Bernoulli's epkg and emir packages for tracking installed packages
>> > and component files in a SQLite database.
>>
>> If I were to start over now, I wouldn't write Closql. At the time it
>> made a lot of sense because I knew nothing about databases and because
>> it allowed me to switch out the old data store ("everything is *its own*
>> file") without changing internal interfaces much. Moving from files to
>> a database did wonders for performance, so at first I didn't mind the
>> performance impact of the OO interface on top of the database.
>> Meanwhile I have moved away from the OO interface for anything that
>> deals with more than one package at a time, turning many rows into
>> EIEIO objects is a bit costly.
>
> Hmm - I had thought it might be an interesting exercise to get
> acquainted with Emacs's version of CLOS, but maybe not.
That is well worth it.
And Closql is at least interesting; it's just that "turn every row into
an object" is too slow if you have thousands of rows and all you really
want to do is display a table of some of the columns. (If you do use
Closql, then use the "next" branch, that would already be merged, if I
weren't waiting for two downstreams to act.)
> However, just
> reviewing the way you've organized the package data is probably going
> to be useful. For example, trying to understand the best way to
> assess whether a particular version of a package is an upgrade. I
> don't know about the behavior of package.el in master, but
> historically, if there is a version of a package on MELPA and the same
> package is available on GNU or NONGNU ELPA, package.el will treat the
> version on GNU/NONGNU as an upgrade even though the one on MELPA is
> more recent. I assume it has something to do with the comparison of
> commit hashes or dates with more traditional version numbers, but
> that's just a guess.
I'm afraid I am not doing any of that. I just track the HEAD of the
most authoritative repository.
>
>>
>> When I switched to SQLite, Emacs had no built-in support (coming in
>> Emacs 29) and there also was no module, so EmacSQL was the natural
>> choice. I am the maintainer of that now, so I definitely think it
>> serves a purpose, but I do have some reservations.
>>
>> The next release will feature new backends that use the built-in support
>> and a module, but if I were to start now, I probably would go with the
>> built-in support directly.
>>
>> EmacSQL allows writing SQL using vectors instead of concatenating
>> strings, which is nice, but for people just getting started with SQL, it
>> has the disadvantage that you now have to learn two things, SQL and the
>> almost SQL vector syntax, which isn't 100% complete and doesn't map 1:1.
>>
>> The main limitation of EmacSQL is that it stores everything (except
>> NULL) as a string. This is why I would probably avoid it now, because
>> it limits interoperability with anything that doesn't use EmacSQL.
>
> That's only because it was designed to interact with sqlite through a
> pipe to the shell program, though, right?
No, it was a design decision by the original author, in order to keep
things simple.
> It seems like a method for
> compiling sexpr-type representations of sql queries into statements
> usable with the builtin support would still be useful, and not limited
> in the same way - since the returned values do not require serializing
> as text by the sqlite shell then parsing them in Elisp.
Of course "SQL as vectors" and "store everything as a string" are not
tied to each other per se, but with EmacSQL you get both.
> [ Digression...]
> Just looking at the src/sqlite.c in master, as there is no other
> documentation of the sqlite support I can see, only a simplified form
> of the core API is supported - not unreasonable for an initial
> release. The only noticeable absence I see, based on a cursory review
> of the sqlite3 API spec, is that a select query cannot be reset.
> Maybe because each db connection is associated with at most one
> prepared statement at a time by the design of the Lisp_Sqlite
> pseudovector?
>
> Other than that, I note that rows are returned as lists rather than
> arrays, which makes the semantics more incompatible with emacsql than
> it really has to be. Can that be changed before 29 is released?
Why is that a problem? What would we gain if the DSL and the output
both used vectors or both lists?
> The associated sqlite-mode looks interesting. I only wonder why it
> doesn't derive from tabulated-list mode instead of directly from
> special. Tabulated list mode would seem to be made for things like
> database tables.
>
> Lynn
Jonas
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-03-22 11:17 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 36+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-03-20 1:18 Unboxed package manager Lynn Winebarger
2023-03-20 6:30 ` Yuan Fu
2023-03-20 8:55 ` Lynn Winebarger
2023-03-20 9:09 ` Lynn Winebarger
2023-03-20 15:25 ` Philip Kaludercic
2023-03-20 16:12 ` Lynn Winebarger
2023-03-20 16:53 ` Philip Kaludercic
2023-03-20 18:11 ` Jonas Bernoulli
2023-03-21 1:40 ` Lynn Winebarger
2023-03-22 11:17 ` Jonas Bernoulli [this message]
2023-03-22 14:31 ` Lynn Winebarger
2023-03-22 23:39 ` Lynn Winebarger
2023-03-21 19:06 ` Augusto Stoffel
2023-03-21 19:10 ` Philip Kaludercic
2023-03-21 19:57 ` Augusto Stoffel
2023-03-21 20:06 ` Philip Kaludercic
2023-03-21 0:23 ` Gregory Heytings
2023-03-21 0:25 ` Gregory Heytings
2023-03-21 1:55 ` Lynn Winebarger
2023-03-21 10:36 ` Lynn Winebarger
2023-03-21 10:52 ` Gregory Heytings
2023-03-21 13:23 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-03-21 13:33 ` Gregory Heytings
2023-03-21 14:13 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-03-21 14:20 ` Gregory Heytings
2023-03-21 17:29 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-03-22 0:48 ` Lynn Winebarger
2023-03-22 14:42 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-03-22 22:22 ` Lynn Winebarger
2023-03-23 6:46 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-03-23 13:30 ` Lynn Winebarger
2023-03-24 17:54 ` chad
2023-03-26 1:51 ` Lynn Winebarger
2023-03-23 1:44 ` David Masterson
2023-03-23 7:02 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-03-22 7:29 ` tomas
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
List information: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=87lejprq6e.fsf@bernoul.li \
--to=jonas@bernoul.li \
--cc=casouri@gmail.com \
--cc=emacs-devel@gnu.org \
--cc=owinebar@gmail.com \
--cc=philipk@posteo.net \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this public inbox
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).