How do I install a local version of scribble, without cloning?

Questions & Answers
1

I'm using Racket v8.16 on macOS Sequoia. I'm getting back to hacking scribble after 9 months. I had installed a local git clone of scribble in v8.14. I updated to v8.16 by simply installing the distribution. Of course this overlaid my local version of scribble. I'd prefer not to create a new git clone of scribble and then merge my changes into it. I would prefer to just keep using my existing Git repo. I've already merged the latest commits on the master branch into it.

Is there a way to persuade raco pkg to do this?

2

I wonder if raco pkg migrate 8.4 will automatically pick up your old clone? (I assume "18" was a typo)

3

Yeah, it was a typo. I fixed it, it was v8.14. I ended up cloning it, then push the old repo to GitHub, then adding the GitHub repo as a remote, and pulling my code from there.

Next time I update Racket I'll try out the raco pkg migrate command, instead of the little script I use to install my preferred set of packages.

4

I dropped the directory and it, um, does not break, like this:

raco pkg update --no-setup --clone <PKG>
rm -rf <PKG>
mv <OLD-CLONE> <PKG>
raco setup
5

Thanks. However, my hope was that I could avoid cloning a rather large git repo, since I already had it on my filesystem. But it's good to know I could have just jammed it in place, instead of pushing and pulling my changes through a shared git repo.

6

There is way to do this (as done by various GHA workflows in the Racket repos -- DrRacket, Typed Racket, and others all do this), and there are even lower-level Raco commands to do this. But I don't know enough Raco to adapt the commands and fill in the details.

7

Specifically, the local_catalogs line does some magic (like running pkg/dirs-catalog to get a catalog that points to already cloned repos, setup-racket/src/common.ts at master · Bogdanp/setup-racket · GitHub).