Alex, many thanks for the suggestions. I feel I’m putting too many obstacles in the way. (On the other hand, perhaps my situation is not so unusual.) I’m trying to make something work with as few barriers as possible, both for experienced (but non-Racket!) developers, and for Mac users who are still unsure about the command-line.
> You can always create an executable (using "raco exe") and a distribution > (using "raco dist") which packs all dependencies in a single directory. This indeed was my original plan. But I worried about updates: `brew update` (or `raco pkg update`) are straightforward enough that people won’t balk. I think I can persuade people to do a one-off manual install process, but probably not repeated ones. In fact, as a first attempt I used homebrew to distribute an executable produced by `raco dist`. But to do this one has to go against the spirit of homebrew; and it’s therefore a pain to arrange. > You could also provide a small shell script to update the PATH, which users > will have to run once for installation (I believe MacOS stores environment > variables in a plist?) In the end, I went with the “please copy this shell command into a terminal” approach to have users set the PATH. Under MacOS, at least one mechanism to set the path is to create a file under /etc/paths.d/ whose contents are the required paths, so that’s what I did. (Paths set in one's bash config aren’t picked up by Mac GUI applications, not that that matters particularly in this case.) The only downside here is that the user needs to sudo the command. As I say, perhaps I’m just making up ad hoc objections, in which case I apologise. I’m reasonably happy with where I’ve ended up, though I remain hopeful that a more universal package manager will someday arise, perhaps along the lines of Nix (or Guix). Many thanks again, James -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/171A1141-3D94-43ED-93FC-722E4105CDD6%40gmail.com.
