Re: [Chicken-hackers] new CHICKEN 5 egg installation

[Peter Bex]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 03:42:36PM +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 02:00:46PM +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> > > Some time ago there was a strong interest in supporting mulitple local egg
> > > repos (i.e. CHICKEN_REPOSITORY would specify a list of directories, each
> > > of which may contain eggs). Would that allow dropping -prefix, and still
> > > provide a way to split installations across multiple directories, and 
> > > thus solve
> > > the requirements for packaging (-no-install-deps) and Salmonella?
> >
> > I think that would be a nice way to support this, and would also make a
> > Python virtualenv-like tool possible, so one can have local project-specific
> > installations of different egg version combinations.
> 
> I recall that I didn't like this too much, due to the added ambiguousness
> of where eggs are found + installed

For something like this (and probably also for Salmonella) you only need to
support two paths: a user path and a system path.  The user path should
have precedence over the system path, and if the library is not found
there it can be taken from the system path.

Of course, if you have two paths, why not go all the way and support a
full search path with an arbitrary number of entries?

If you're not careful, *that* could get rather confusing, like you say,
but I don't see why it needs to be our problem: if a user makes a mess
of their setup, that's their own business :)

And of course, people will find clever semi-legitimate uses for a
full search path, like for example NixOS.

Cheers,
Peter

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