Re: Racket packages / build system

[Dimos Dimakakos <me@bendersteed.tech>]

Bonface M. K. writes:

> To simply put it, AFAIU updating a package would
> require racket to update it's references(either
> links, and other references that I won't go into),
> hence creating some form of "global state";
> thereby if you use raco, every package updated
> would lead to some update with racket's search
> paths or dirs somewhere. Any ideas to overcome
> this wall? (or anything I've got wrong somewhere?)

This was one of the main problems that I also encountered when working
on this. racket2nix solves this by generating a temporary environment
(by coping most of the racket folders and the deps needed as writable
folders) where it installs with raco and then tries to update the global
state of racket.

To be honest this solution is kinda hacky and also slow, but I couldn't
think of another one at the time I tried to work on the issue. It's a
reality that the racket install system is quite stateful and also many
operations seem to try to touch files. Installing with raco for example
will try to recompile the dependencies of the new package and other such
examples.

Anyway, I hope you can find a way to move this forward!