[isabelle-dev] Standard component setup (Re: NEWS)

[Alexander Krauss]

On 01/05/2012 10:22 AM, Makarius wrote:
> I think one could publish ~isabelle/contrib_devel via HTTP, although
> it would require some clean up and tuning, say to expand symlinks.
> Another question is how to export the actual directory structure,
> without maintaining explicit index.html and tar.gz versions of
> everything.

I had a look at this. There does not seem to be an apache extension that
would let us publish a directory structure as a downloadable tarball.
Also, the admins won't let us use the Apache autoindex facility, but
they gave me a PHP script that does the same thing.

So a low-tech suggestion with only minor overhead would be:

* Components live in /home/isabelle/public_components as tarballs. The
directory is regarded as append-only, possibly with infrequent garbage
collection, which moves outdated packages to some archive location.
The packages should be files, not symlinks (to make the directory more 
self-contained)
I'll volunteer to provide the initial content based on contrib_devel and 
other sources, if people agree with the general idea.

* The directory is accessible, cf.
http://isabelle.in.tum.de/devel/components
As the path indicates, this is mainly for developers. There could be a
script in Admin/ that helps to bootstrap the local clone from this source.


> The more general question behind this is about an official Isabelle
> component repository, like major projects have it (Eclipse, Netbeans
>  etc. even jEdit). But this needs substantial extra efforts to
> maintain.

The above gives us a poor man's repository with several advantages over
the current state

- single place to look for stuff
- uniform usage (download, untar, init_component, that's it.)


Jasmin wrote:
>> Could we instead provide a little script (or Isabelle tool) that
>> turns a tarball/zip downloaded from upstream into a packaged
>> Isabelle component?

> In the case of Yices and Vampire, the gain would be minimal: Without
[...]

Ok... let's forget about non-free stuff for now...

Alex