On May 16, 8:41 pm, Stefan Karpinski <stefan.karpin... <at> gmail.com>
wrote:
> I've been working on the package system from the other end — see base/pkg.jl. The basic premise is that each Julia package corresponds to a Git repo somewhere, possibly on GitHub, but not necessarily. When you install or use a set of packages, you create a top-level git repo and the packages are installed submodules. I do some magic to make it possible to push and pull everything needed to reconstruct every point in a package collections history through just the top-level repo. This makes it trivial to synchronize package state across multiple machines or share package setups between developers. As a bonus, you have a perfect record of every state your packages have ever been in. Have you ever screwed up your MacPorts or Ruby Gems state? That'll never happen.
>
> So far, I've been treating the packages themselves as completely opaque submodules, but obviously we'll want some standards there as well. R seems like a good example, although agree with John that the documentation system is not ideal.

This sounds good in general. However, as someone who has several
machine without network connections could I make a request:

Please don't make it so that the automatic system assumes it can do
network access whenever it wants and gets fatally confused when the
network requests don't work. I don't mind having to jump through hoops
and do manual overrides to work around this very convenient in general
behaviour, but very occasionally in the past I've worked with software
that assumes "everything has a network connection, so there is not
alternative provided" and they weren't good experiences.