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Explaining the rationale behind external binaries in the Readme.

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Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas 2024-04-16 12:30:54 -05:00
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ExoRepo provides [syntactic sugar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_sugar) for [Pharo's Iceberg](https://books.pharo.org/booklet-ManageCode/) to support repositories beyond GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket, starting with Gitea/Forgejo.
**IMPORTANT!** This requires the installation of the external open source binary dependency Restify available at:
<https://github.com/itzg/restify/>.
This should be installed independiently. In Gnu/Linux and Unix alike systems the restify binary is adviced to be instaled under `~/.local/bin`.
Further versions of ExoRepo will install external dependencies like this one automatically, when they are needed.
For the rationale behind external binary dependencies look at the **Notes** section in the end of this document.
## Installation
Metacello new repository: 'gitea://code.sustrato.red/Offray/VideoWeb'; baseline: 'VideoWeb'; fetch
### from Gitea
Run from a playground:
@ -42,3 +50,16 @@ Metacello new
repository: 'https://code.tupale.co/Offray/TiddlyWikiPharo';
load.
```
## Notes
**Why to depend on external FLOSS binaries?**
While the Pharo ecosystem provides an unmatched development experience,
some libraries are not available or mature enough in Pharo, despite its vibrant, but small community.
So, for practical reasons, we have reached already the scenario where we need to rely on external pacakges to provide the functionality we need without developing it ourselves.
Also, the context where we teach Pharo and Mallable Systems, includes universities with slow or behind proxy connections, where dowloading and unziping a single binary is quite faster than resolving packages dependencies and loading them, recursively from the network.
In that case, we opted for using self contained external binaries, packaged in a single executable file, derived from Free Libre Open Source Software repositories, written in languages that provide such small self contained binaries, like Nim and Go.
For ExoRepo, we rely on Restify, because Gitea repositories don't provide a external JSON API and restify allow us to query Gitea repositories obtaining a JSON response to leverage on NeoJSON and STON Pharo libraries, without implementing cumbersome HTML page parsers and adding a single binary was more agile that requiring full HTML parsing capabilites, just to query Gitea repositories.