I agree with several of your pronouncements, such as the fact that libraries need to be immutable, etc.
I think that the naming system should use "user/libname/version" so that it can be reflected in the directory structure of the lib folder of arc where they will be downloaded, and can be easily turned into a path. I'd prefer to make it a 'sym instead of a 'string for less typing ;)
Thus the library loading code would be effectively:
(use libname)
where libname is just a symbol representing a path to which "$arc_home/lib/" and ".arc" are attached. This makes it easy to load files which are already in your lib folder that you wrote, or downloaded. It works with downloaded libraries, and can hopefully detect if you've already loaded it or not, and avoid reloading it. In theory since it is a library it won't be changing and thus only needs to be loaded once.
We can also have other functions that fetch the libraries, or make 'use fetch them automatically. In that case it will need to know how to find them. To that end I propose we add a file to the lib folder called something like "server-list" or something. The file is merely a list of http locations, such as hacks.catdancer.ws, and fred.github.com/arcstuff. Each location will be a folder that contains a file named "libs.arc" or similar, which contains all of the metadata necessary to find the libraries belonging to that server.
Possible meta-data: Name of library, file name and location, date updated, author, dependencies etc.
In theory the package system can determine by reading these files which version of the library is newest, (by version number and date) or if given more particular criteria, find an older version.
I'm basing my ideas off of the debian package system, which I have found very useful. The nice thing about it is that anyone can host a package server, and a package can be located on any server. They aren't tied to a particular server by their name, for instance. It also automatically downloads prereqs, which can be very handy.
Summary:
1) Library is named by symbol which can be easily converted to a path: catdancer/erp/0
2) Servers which have meta-data on finding packages, a la debian packages/yum/gems, etc. for ease in hosting and finding packages.
3) The 'use function, whatever it's called should be able to load local libraries as well as online ones. It should probably also be capable of taking in a direct web address like CatDancer's lib function.
Ok. Why not support both? That way someone can create a large and structured library with multiple sub-folders if they need to.
I was also hoping of making a version of your 'lib hack to manage the libs already in the lib folder, instead of just those on the web.
(lib binary)
seems like much less typing than
(load "lib/binary.arc")
and also has the advantage of not reloading it if it's already been loaded.
On a side note, how hard would it be to selectively reload individual functions?
(reload example-fn)
Since the anarki help system keeps track of what file the function was declared in, it could presumably be used to automatically read in the file and eval the proper form. I'm just somewhat tired of working in a large library file and having to reload all of the functions, even if I don't need to. (I'm using a very impotent linux box for development, so it can get rather slow)
a large and structured library with multiple sub-folders
I don't think we need to design this system to do everything that somebody might someday need. There's already plenty of solutions for distributing large collections of files such as zip or tar files; we don't need to invent something to solve that problem.
