Now that Clojure 1.0 is out, I think it's a good time to take a look at contrib. I noticed it didn't get an official 1.0 release along with Clojure core. I wonder if this is because its role is just not very well-defined. Several people have expressed this opinion here on the mailing list and on IRC.
My understanding is that contrib began as a "staging ground" for core. If libraries or functions proved themselves useful, then they could be promoted to core. I get the feeling that things have changed since then. For one, core doesn't seem to grow that way any more. There was talk of moving some functions from contrib to core way back in November, but that doesn't seem to have gone anywhere. I understand there's good motivation to keep core small, but perhaps it's time to rethink what contrib is for. The feeling I get now is that contrib is a bucket-o-code. Since we as a community don't have any widely-accepted mechanisms for dependency resolution, there's a quite understandable motivation to put useful libraries in contrib so that other clojure hackers can make use of them with minimal hassle. Right now if you want to handle nontrivial dependencies in your project, you need to use Maven or Ivy. Many are reluctant to try these out since they're perceived as heavy-weight, and the idea of writing executable XML is rightfully viewed with suspicion by folks who're familiar with Greenspun's Tenth Law; it's certainly tacky. But these tools have the advantage that they work right now. I think things could be improved by creating a tool that wraps the functionality that Maven provides in a more pleasant s-expression-based interface and focuses just on the parts of Maven that are relevant to building a Clojure project, but that's a discussion for another thread. I wonder if improving the dependency management story of Clojure will help to clear up the confusion surrounding contrib. I certainly think there's room for a "standard library" that ships with Clojure, and precedent for this seems to be there with the existence of clojure.xml and clojure.zip, but we need some discussion about why these libraries are included and what others might also be worth including. It also may help to think about moving things out of contrib in two ways: in one case functions would be moved into the core.clj namespace (this was proposed of duck-streams' spit function) and in the other whole libraries would get moved into the main Clojure distribution. It's important to be very cautious with the first as these increase the complexity of Clojure for everyone since they get loaded on startup, but I suspect there's room for more growth in the second case. Would love to hear what folks think about this. thanks, Phil --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
