Post-Chez 10 Distro & Release Considerations

LiberalArtist
Sat, 24 Feb 2024 18:06:50 +0000
Distro Packagers

A couple weeks ago, Chez Scheme 10.0 was released, incorporating all of the changes from Racket's branch of Chez Scheme. I'm especially excited about this because Guix has been distributing Racket's branch to support architectures that hadn't been supported upstream: I'm looking forward to simplifying our packaging.

I have a few questions about how to handle distro packaging going forward. I'm asking here because I think all of them concern things developed under the Racket project: a distro that packaged Chez Scheme only could keep doing everything as before, which seems like another testament to the excellent work that's gone in to upstreaming Racket's changes to Chez Scheme.

Release cycles and (not) using Chez as a library

I think I know the answer to this question from previous conversations, but I anticipate it coming up in review, and it would help to have a definitive answer to link to.

My understanding is that there is no plan to align the Chez Scheme and Racket release cycles, and a given released version of Racket will continue to depend on a specific pre-release version of Chez Scheme (except perhaps by coincidence), so distros should not try to link their Racket packages against libkernel.a, scheme.h, or any other such files from their Chez Scheme package.

Even if somehow a distro managed to produce an apparently-running Racket by doing so, my understanding is that the specific Chez Scheme version used is effectively part of Racket's "ABI", so a distro building Racket X against an unexpected Chez version would produce something incompatible with Racket X builds using the correct Chez version, in addition to more subtle potential bugs that seem too painful to contemplate.

In general, distros prefer to remove "bundled" or "vendored" copies of libraries they already have packaged, for good reasons—for example, to enable timely security updates for a library without having to rebuild all dependent packages. But my understanding is that trying to build the latest Racket release against the latest Chez Scheme release is not viable, so distros will need to make an exception.

Zuo releases and stability

Zuo has been in a somewhat unique position with respect to the Racket release process. On the one hand, the most upstream source for Zuo is within the main Racket Git repository, and it has been part of the release at least insomuch as other build scripts are "part of the release". On the other hand, Zuo itself hasn't explicitly been released in quite the same sense as the core Racket runtime system and Racket packages in the main distribution. For example, to my knowledge there hasn't been regression testing à la Release Regressions for v8.12 · Issue #4898 · racket/racket · GitHub, and the extracted repository at GitHub - racket/zuo: A tiny Racket for scripting hasn't been getting release tags—at least, it hadn't had any tags until the relatively recent v1.8 and v1.9, which I saw for the first time while writing this. It hasn't been completely clear where Zuo's compatibility status falls on the continuum from most build scripts (which I'd assume are completely internal and can be changed at will) to the very high emphasis on compatibility for other things that are part of the Racket release process.

Now that upstream Chez Scheme also uses Zuo, it would help to clarify Zuo's status. Guix in fact distributes a package of Zuo, both for end-users and because making it visible to our tooling turns out to be useful: the later was the original motivation, and I suspect other distros may also want to package Zuo for that reason.

From a distro packaging perspective, the most useful compatibility property would be that there exists some version of Zuo—ideally, the most recently released version of Zuo—that is able to build the most recently released versions both of Racket and of Chez Scheme. Racket's usual compatibility approach would satisfy that property, but it could also be satisfied by weaker levels of compatibility.

It would also help to clarify what "counts" as a Zuo release. Continuing to create new tags like the recent v1.8 and v1.9 when incrementing ZUO_VERSION or ZUO_MINOR_VERSION (and doing so like a Racket package version, i.e., updating it when there is something new someone might want to depend on) would work well from my perspective: in fact, Guix has tooling that recognizes that tag pattern and can automatically detect new releases.

The only time I've run into issues with mismatched Zuo versions so far was when the dry-run support added in Zuo 1.8 was used in upstream Chez Scheme before it had been in a Racket release. That wouldn't be a problem if tags like v1.8 constitute Zuo releases, but the rather confusing error message I got at the time made me wonder if Zuo should have something like cmake_minimum_required or AC_PREREQ.

Repository management

Are there scripts, or even just a set of commands that could be documented, for synchronizing between repositories shaped like GitHub - racket/racket: The Racket repository, GitHub - racket/zuo: A tiny Racket for scripting, and GitHub - cisco/ChezScheme: Chez Scheme? I think I remember that git subtree is used, but I haven't worked out the right incantations. Sometimes I get into situations where I need to move between repository shapes while developing patches, where different parts of the Guix packaging may be set up to deal with different shapes.

Similarly, is there a particularly good way to find the Racket commit corresponding to a given Chez Scheme commit, or vice versa? Along those lines, I noticed that add `immutable-vector`, `immutable-vector-copy`, etc. · cisco/ChezScheme@c081296 · GitHub gained an additional Co-authored-by: line when it was imported as Chez Scheme: add `immutable-vector`, `immutable-vector-copy`, etc. · racket/racket@c96c62d · GitHub.

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