search

racket / racket

The Racket repository
https://racket-lang.org/
Other
4.82k stars 661 forks source link

[Feature Request] Automatically prompt users to migrate packages on installation #3887

Open plane opened 3 years ago

plane commented 3 years ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. When I was a new user, I had no idea raco pkg migrate existed, and I didn't know about DrRacket's equivalent "Copy from Version" feature. I wanted to keep Racket up-to-date by installing new versions, but whenever I updated Racket, it always broke my packages! I was frustrated.

Once I learned I could easily migrate packages, I was happy! But other new users may have the same problem I did. In fact, on the Racket Discord server, jimpjorps wrote:

it'd be a nice thing to prompt for, my first version was 8.0 and I flailed for a little bit when I upgraded to 8.1 because I thought I had to manually reinstall everything in raco before noticing Copy from Version

So I'm not the only one who had trouble!

Describe the solution you'd like The installation process should prompt the user when at least one existing Racket installation is detected, asking them if they'd like to migrate the packages from any of those installations. If they say no, the script can mention that the packages can be migrated at any time if the user wishes through a raco pkg migrate command; the graphical installer can mention "Copy from Version" in DrRacket.

Describe alternatives you've considered DrRacket could have a pop-up which appears on the first run after upgrading, asking users if they'd like to migrate their packages from the previous installation. However, this would not help people who install using the command-line installation script.

Do you want to contribute to this feature Yes, I could help!

gus-massa commented 3 years ago

I like the idea, but IIRC there are some problems in multi user installations,

Somewhat related: https://github.com/racket/racket/pull/2127

hunkyjimpjorps commented 3 years ago

One problem I brought up in that discussion is that the macOS version doesn't have an installer the way the Windows and Linux versions do -- it's just an .app package provided in a DMG disk image. Anything that relies on an installer would have to have some alternate implementation for Mac users.

I think the solution might just be as straightforward as putting a message like "Upgrading from an earlier version? Use raco pkg migrate after installation" on the download page as a reminder.

yjqww6 commented 3 years ago

Similarly, I hope it would run raco setup automatically after I update my snapshot installation to newer one.

racket-discourse-github-bot commented 2 years ago

This issue has been mentioned on Racket Discussions. There might be relevant details there:

https://racket.discourse.group/t/rationale-for-per-version-user-scope-packages/543/13

racket-discourse-github-bot commented 2 years ago

This issue has been mentioned on Racket Discussions. There might be relevant details there:

https://racket.discourse.group/t/rationale-for-per-version-user-scope-packages/543/1

omentic commented 10 months ago

Why is raco pkg migrate not automatically run after every version upgrade? I find it to be a constant nuisance, and think that this behavior is confounding for all the people who use Racket as an introduction to programming in particular.

shhyou commented 4 months ago

Partly addressed in #4843 (but not fully solved yet).

gus-massa commented 3 months ago

I'm not sure if this is relevant, but a few month ago I had a problem with Python, because (IIRC) the numba package was compatible only with 3.10. So when I ungraded to 3.11 and tried to copy all the packages I got an error. (Perhaps it was an incompatibility between numba an numpy, my memory is weak.) (I'm not sure about the details, I reverted and I'm not using that for a long time, but if someone think it's relevant I can try to document the exact problem and error if it happens again.)