Versioning

[gaborcsardi]

Would be probably required before supporting #23, upgrades, I guess. It would be great to support semantic versioning.

(Btw. it would also be great to have versioned dependencies, but I don't want to rush forward.....)

[klmr]

I think I’m going to bake this into #23. Versioning is really a distinct problem from modules per se, and fits with the packaging mechanism. I’d like to keep these things separate: modules are source files. Packaging (however implemented) tracks meta-information about modules.

[gaborcsardi]

Sure, that makes a lot sense. So #23 essentially means a packaging mechanism, which would be just great to have!

Imho packaging is where Python is not so strong. This is the reason for the many "third-party" solutions like easy_insall, pip, conda, etc. I think npm is doing much better when it comes to distribution and packaging.

[mlell]

Could it be enough to handle this as git submodules? That would delegate the task of updating, leaving just the task on how to define and satisfy the dependencies of a module.

But that would require every module to be in its own directory, i.e. each module that is installable this way must have an init.R file.

[klmr]

We presumably want to use (something like) Pubgrub to resolve dependencies, which means supporting that versioning format. Alternatively, (vendored) libsolv.