Subject: Re: [bug#59322] [PATCH v2 4/4] etc: teams: Add chez.scm to Racket team's scope.

From: Philip McGrath <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2022 18:52:39 -0500

On Saturday, November 19, 2022 2:54:55 AM EST Liliana Marie Prikler wrote:
> Am Freitag, dem 18.11.2022 um 14:33 -0500 schrieb Philip McGrath:
> > I could certainly imagine having a Chez team that doesn't necessarily
> > care about Racket. Likewise, in both languages, I imagine there could
> > be people  interested in packages that use the language but who
> > wouldn't necessarily be interested in the packaging of the compilers
> > and run-time systems themselves.
> > But, since no one else has signed on and I've made the majority of
> > changes to both files in the last two years, designing a more fine-
> > grained team structure seemed premature.
> 
> I can see where you're coming from, but my personal opinion is that
> merging these "two" teams now might discourage us from splitting them
> later.  In my humble opinion, adding a chez team with you as sole
> member wouldn't hurt for the time being.
> 

Is there a requirement that teams' scopes be disjoint? In other words, is 
there any reason "gnu/packages/chez.scm" shouldn't be in scope for both the 
racket team and a potential chez team?

Another factor that might be relevant: Matthew Flatt tells me he is actively 
working with the Chez Scheme maintainers to merge the two branches. I'm not 
involved in these discussions myself: my understanding is that details are 
still being worked out, and I don't know what the time frame will be, but from 
what I'm told it's gone from "not in the foreseeable future" to "will happen".

(There's no plan to synchronize the release cycles, and Racket will continue 
to rely on unstable Chez system functions and to have the Chez version form 
part of its ABI, so we will likely continue to have a chez-scheme-for-racket 
package, but it should be a much simpler transformation to use a particular 
pre-release version.)

After the merge, we should be able to bootstrap upstream Chez Scheme via 
Racket as we currently do with chez-scheme-for-racket, at which changes to 
Racket will also potentially impact Chez Scheme.

Personally, if there were more people involved, I'd organize it as teams for 
chez-and-racket-bootstrap, chez, and racket, as I'd initially tried to do in 
https://issues.guix.gnu.org/53878, but that especially seems like too much if 
they all consist of the same one person. If you still want a chez team, 
though, I guess I'm ok with that.

I just hope this need not delay the update to 8.7 any further.

-Philip