[MLton] library naming
Matthew Fluet
fluet at cs.cornell.edu
Tue Oct 17 18:18:44 PDT 2006
>> Not making code public misses out on the chance to share and the
>> chance to collaborate. Having a namespace of your own on a public
>> server encourages sharing.
> ...
>>
>> It really isn't a library. I do want the infrastructure to support
>> an "ad-hoc collection of various people's libraries". I would be
>> happy to have anyone's library in there.
> ...
>> The naming proposal was aimed at even removing the barrier of
>> requiring SVN commit access (although I intend to be liberal with
>> that). It allows people to work on libraries in another repository
>> and not worry about stepping on toes. Further, it allows users to
>> draw code from different repositories and combine them into one local
>> repository, and greatly reduce the chance of conflicts.
>
> It sounds like you are describing a decentralized development model with
> a goal of allowing easy combinations and merges of libraries.
...
> I think Subversion works quite well for the development of MLton, which
> is inherently centralized, but perhaps something like git would be a
> better way to encourage the kind of "anarchic structure" desired for
> this library project.
I don't think the git model applies here. Libraries, by their very
nature, are non-overlapping entities. Within an idividual library, there
may be multiple threads of development, but I don't expect a RegExp
library and a RedBlackTree library to have significant overlap.
Furthermore, I think the decentralized nature is exactly what we are
trying to avoid. SML libraries are few and far between, so the idea is to
have a "one-stop-shopping" location. Now, with a git like model, perhaps
having a mlton.org/GitRepos page on which authors could publish their own
repositories would work, but again that adds a level of indirection.
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