PLT Scheme in Extras

[Warren Togami]

Gérard Milmeister wrote:
> 
> Currently it contains among others: bigloo, gauche, chicken, stklos,
> scsh, plt, clisp, sbcl, gcl, ghc, hugs98, curry, smlnj, mlkit, mlton,
> mosml, ciao, gprolog, mercury, erlang, oo2c, abcm2ps, snd, coq.
> 
> I don't intend to maintain this as a repository in the long run, but
> hope that the packages will find their way into Extras.
> If you are interested, please help to review the packages.

I have used DrScheme in school this semester and interested in your plt 
package.  A few weeks ago I tried to package plt earlier into 
sub-packages for the various components along with a split library 
package with libraries living in /usr/lib somewhat like Mandrake's 
incredibly ugly package.  It became too complex, and just didn't work 
properly so I gave up.

I like your everything in one package approach.  It works fine for the 
typical use of learning scheme in the DrScheme interface.  Now that I 
think of it, nothing else really *requires* the libraries to live in 
/usr/lib.  At least I think.

Your package looks fine as-is except this...
Name:           plt
Summary:        An interactive, integrated, graphical programming 
environment for Scheme.
%description
DrScheme is an interactive, integrated, graphical programming
environment for the Scheme, MzScheme, and MrEd programming languages.

While this is the name of the source tarball, perhaps the package should 
be named something else?

http://www.plt-scheme.org/
"PLT Scheme is an umbrella name for a family of implementations of the 
Scheme programming language.  PLT is the group of people who produce PLT 
Scheme."

http://www.plt-scheme.org/software/
While DrScheme is the most common use of this package, it also contains 
several components that can be used for other things and not necessarily 
DrScheme.

So perhaps we should rename it to something like "Name: plt-scheme" 
which matches their domain name, and is much more descriptive of what is 
actually contained in the package.  Perhaps we should also add 
"Provides: drscheme = %{version}" since that is the most common use of 
this package.  Bad idea?

There are further problems with the Summary and description.

Summary:        An interactive, integrated, graphical programming 
environment for Scheme.

http://www.plt-scheme.org/software/
This only describes DrScheme and not the other components listed here.

%description
DrScheme is an interactive, integrated, graphical programming
environment for the Scheme, MzScheme, and MrEd programming languages.

MzScheme and MrEd are not actually separate programming languages like 
this description implies.  This needs to be rewritten along with the 
Summary.  Include short descriptions of each component, with the largest 
description for DrScheme.

Thoughts?

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com