Will racket-minimal include Rhombus?

[juanfra684]

I see that version 1.0 is coming soon and I was wondering if the racket-minimal tarballs will include Rhombus once it is stabilized. I assume that the main distribution tarball will include it but I'm not sure how you see racket-minimal in this context.

For some limited machines, installing packages with raco can be quite slow. The full Racket package does not have this issue but it requires many dependencies. Racket-minimal has always been an intermediate option and several Linux/BSD systems already include it as a package. The extra space that Rhombus would consume wouldn't be a problem.

[usaoc]

We already have snapshot Rhombus distributions on https://rhombus-lang.org/, so the matter is just to release stable distributions in addition. I think Racket distributions should definitely not include Rhombus.

[juanfra684]

The issue is that if racket-minimal and rhombus-minimal (just a name for this example) include the same binaries (racket, raco, etc), the packages in Linux and BSD distributions will need a conflict. This will prevent both racket-minimal and rhombus-minimal from being installed simultaneously.

[mflatt]

I have been thinking about this, and the way forward might be a Rhombus package catalog that is specific to each Racket release. That way, pre-built Rhombus packages would be available to add to a Racket installation.

Pre-built packages still require some platform-specific compilation with Racket CS, but I think it should be relatively fast. I will have to check how fast it actually is on, say, an old Raspberry Pi.