De-stdlibification impacting usability of scripts from the command line

brenhinkeller · January 7, 2023, 10:48pm

Please chime in here if you have any opinions about the fact that any scripts that do using SomeStdlib (currently starting with DelimitedFiles, but lots of others including Statistics are on the chopping block too) are about to stop working in 1.9+ unless you are running those scripts in an environment where that stdlib has been explicitly ] add ed

github.com/JuliaLang/julia

Ship remove Stdlibs in 1.9+

opened 09:06PM - 06 Jan 23 UTC

closed 12:52PM - 21 Feb 23 UTC

LilithHafner

excision stdlib feature

The following script works on Julia 1.8.4 ```julia using DelimitedFiles tem…p = tempname() open(temp, "w") do io println(io, "1,2,3") end println(sum(readdlm(temp, ',', Int))) ``` Ideally it should work on all future Julia versions. In interactive use, once `DelimitedFiles.jl` is no longer a stdlib, the user will be prompted to install the package at the REPL. In package use, it should already be in the environment. As a scripts without a Project.toml, IIUC, the plan is to make this fail with `ERROR: ArgumentError: Package DelimitedFiles not found in current path.`. An alternate proposal from @IanButterworth on slack is > for scripts, if the package name cannot be resolved, and its in a special list known to Julia of names that used to be stdlibs, then auto-install it and carry on Much like the interactive REPL prompt, but install & warn rather than prompt. EDIT to clarify: This would be backed by downloading and loading DelimitedFiles with Pkg, not by packaging DelimitedFiles with Julia.

giordano · January 7, 2023, 11:08pm

You’re missing “any scripts that don’t have an associated package environment”.

brenhinkeller · January 7, 2023, 11:09pm

Yeah, I was figuring that was covered by the “unless you are running those scripts in an environment where that stdlib has been explicitly ] add ed”

stillyslalom · January 7, 2023, 11:40pm

I feel that the time to remove standard libraries was v0.7. Semantic versioning may not be clear on this case, but this is going to be a surprising new source of errors for many users. Regardless of semver rules-lawyering, the benefit to removing previously-included functionality in a non-breaking minor release should be made more clear than it presently is.