This may be a distraction from real tools.deps work, but was wondering if others had come across a series of articles by Russ Cox on Golang and package versioning. This is one of those articles I have looked at recently: https://research.swtch.com/vgo-principles. One thing I found interesting is the number of different package managers that use SAT solvers to find what collection of modules and their versions to use. In case you are curious, Russ argues that maybe this is a bad idea.

I like the new exec stuff. User deps.edn :

{:aliases {:reveal {:extra-deps {vlaaad/reveal {:mvn/version "1.0.130"}}
                    :ns-default vlaaad.reveal}}}

yes, i liked that too. was hoping i could stack -X to use multiple tools (like one could with -A), but i get the impression that's not part of the design intent.

I wonder if that can be done using injected basis

haven't thought about that angle yet, may be there's something to that. i did think one might be able to make one thing that's designed to do the stacking for anything else that might follow its conventions.

@vlaaad I would encourage people creating tools for Clojure CLI to support theuse the -X flag. As well as using key value pairs for clarity you can also set default values, making the comand line even simpler As example, using Sean's clj-new project and the alias below I can create a library project with a default name by just running the command clojure -X:project/new

:project/new
  {:extra-deps {seancorfield/clj-new {:mvn/version "1.1.215"}}
   :exec-fn    clj-new/create
   :exec-args  {:template lib :name practicalli/playground}
   :main-opts  ["-m" "clj-new.create"]}

I mean that's exactly what I do :)

So I could have an alias similar to this, that would let me do clojure -X:inspect/reveal to run a repl and clojure -X:inspect/reveal :command prepl to run prepl instead

:inspect/reveal
  {:extra-deps {vlaaad/reveal {:mvn/version "1.0.130"}}
   :exec-fn    vlaaad.reveal
   :exec-args  {:command repl}}

:inspect/reveal
  {:extra-deps {vlaaad/reveal {:mvn/version "1.0.130"}}
   :exec-fn    vlaaad.reveal
   :exec-args  {:command repl}
   :main-opts  ["-m" "vlaaad.reveal" "repl"]}

A lot of tools support later command flags overriding earlier ones anyway 🙂

i have something for starting a socket repl on a specific port. invocation is like:

clj -X:alc.socket-repl :port 9123

clj -X:alc.socket-repl
Socket repl port: 38735
Clojure 1.10.1
user=>

Composability of "main" functions is problematic though: there's no guarantee a "main" will exit (if it starts a server, for example) and aliases in general are merged to produce the final configuration that is used to start a (single) program.

What has been suggested (several times, here in this channel) is to write your own "runner" function that takes a list of functions to execute and runs them one after the other. Now that programs can get at the basis easily (if they are run via the CLI tools -- not if they are run via a JAR!), you could pass a list of aliases and the "runner" could walk that list and exec each alias...

...you wouldn't get the same semantics of composition but you would get "multiple main" functions run (and you could control the semantics yourself).

(this is exactly why we have a build script that wraps the CLI: you can specific multiple "commands" to build and it runs the CLI for each command, by way of a shorthand)

has anyone tried the clj prerelease 1.10.1.693 on windows?

I've done a fair amount of testing with it, but would be great if someone else had used it

in case others want to try and don't want to look for instructions (https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/clj-on-Windows): 0) remove previous installation (for me this was deleteing the ClojureTools folder under Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules) 1) download: https://download.clojure.org/install/win-install-1.10.1.693.ps1 2) did the "unblock" thing via properties (right-click on file's icon in windows explorer and choose properties) 3) execute the ps script via powershell 4) choose 2 (for under Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules) and wait a bit 5) clj -h to verify version 6) freshly clone a clojure project that uses deps.edn 7) start it via clj something close to those steps worked for me.