[Snow-users-list] some questions about snow References:

alexander.sepp at student.uni-augsburg.de alexander.sepp at student.uni-augsburg.de
Mon Mar 19 12:47:08 EDT 2007


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<5868D729-CDBB-4C33-9C47-CC5D014AAF83 at iro.umontreal.ca>
From: Alexander Sepp <alexander.sepp at student.uni-augsburg.de>
Date: 19 Mar 2007 17:47:02 +0100
In-Reply-To: <5868D729-CDBB-4C33-9C47-CC5D014AAF83 at iro.umontreal.ca>
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Marc Feeley <feeley at iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

hi,

> > * Signature handling
> >
> > afaics, every file in a snowball archive has it's own signature.
> > why is this the case? wouldn't it be cleaner (and simpler) to
> > provide the signature over the complete snowball archive itself? the
> > problem is, that if i can not verify the origin of a tarball, i do
> > not even want to untar it.
> 
> The snowball structure is designed so that a package's parts can be  
> contributed, and signed, by different people.  For example someone  
> may be working on the Bigloo port while someone else is working on a  
> Gambit port.  The maintainer can then collect these (separately  
> signed) parts and just drop them into the package directory, then  
> upload the package.

Shouldn't this be handled by a source code management tool?

I do not want a cert for each developer contributing to snow. Imagine
you would have a cert from each developer contributed once to the linux
kernel...

It should be enough to trust the maintainer. If the maintainer is not
trustworthy then the snowball is useless anyway.

While at it: Is there a repository one can track changes made to the
core framework?

> > i did some quick tests with the digest package. i noticed a
> > performance drop of 2/3 using gambit compared to the version in
> > ~~lib/digest.scm (delivered with the gambit system). how do i get
> > the performance back, still using the snowball?
> 
> That is odd.  There is no reason why Snow packages should run slower.
> I will investigate.

Where you able to reproduce my observations?

> The "snow-XXX" name is used when there is a possible name conflict  
> with an XXX operation on some Scheme system.  Often snow-XXX and XXX  
> are related operations, but they may have slightly different  
> semantics (accepted number of arguments, result in special cases,  
> signaling of errors, etc).
> 
> I don't particularly like the "snow-" prefix and I hope that with  
> time the Snow packages can deprecate those names when the various  
> Scheme systems adopt a consistent semantics.  A good example is fx+,  
> fx*, etc which should be standardized by R6RS.

Yes, cluttering the core language is not a good idea at all.

Maybe it would be better to not support _all_ scheme systems out there.
i would prefer quality over quantity.

alex


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