Scryer Project Root

[jjtolton]

I'd like to solicit practices folks are using or maybe that we could consolidate around for the idea of a Scryer "project root".

In various languages there is some directory identified as a project root, even if it's a .git directory or a README.md at minimum.

I'm thinking of using a file called project.pl or scryer.json as a project root. Of course there are tradeoffs about whether it's more ergonomic to use one or the other.

Thoughts?

I like @hurufu's technique here but I'd like to recurse through subdirectories for "Scryer Projects" rather than have a single flat directory with them.

[bakaq]

YES YES YES!!! I love when languages have a directory local environment (Rust, Julia, NodeJS), and I much prefer it to global environments that you have to do some inconvenient workarounds to wrap (Python's venvs).

I think the manifest file should be called scryer-project.pl or something like that, specially if we are going to use Scryer specific features (like how precisely library(X) is resolved) in them. I would like for a more generic name like project.pl to be reserved to something that could work between at least a few different Prolog implementations. As for the format, Prolog is expressive enough for what we would want to put in there. In fact, Prolog is much more expressive than JSON, so if you don't like Turing-complete configuration languages then maybe this is an argument for JSON, but I don't think that would be a problem because we will probably want a very specific schema for the manifest file. Prior art is in DocLog's configuration file.

I think a basic initial schema with just metadata (as nothing will use it for now) could be something like this:

name("name").
version(1,2,3). % Optional, enforce semver format or allow arbitrary version strings?
description("desc"). % Optional
authors(["author1", "author2"]). % Optional
license("MIT OR GPL-3.0-or-later"). % Optional, SPDX license expression
license_file("LICENSE"). % Optional, for custom licenses
repository("url"). % Optional
homepage("url"). % Optional

Heavily inspired by Rust's Cargo.toml. Later we could actually use this for dependencies and stuff.