CompilePackage: option to compile dependencies

[mtorpey]

As discussed in Issue #49, it's hard to know when to compile dependencies on an update. Our current approach is to automatically run the build script on packages that cannot be loaded. Then we have CompilePackage as a manual workaround for any packages that are missed.

@james-d-mitchell suggests that it might be nice to be able to compile a package and all its dependencies, since this is something that comes up a lot (again, see Issue #49). This seems like a reasonable idea, either by an optional argument to CompilePackage or by introducing a new function with a name like CompilePackageAndDependencies.

Related: how about a CompileAllPackages function that runs the script on everything in the user package dir? Seems like this would be useful for things like updated GAP versions.

[james-d-mitchell]

I think you can close this now, you resolved it right?

[mtorpey]

Not quite. We can run CompilePackage, but it doesn't compile dependencies automatically, which might be a nice addition later on.

[mtorpey]

4½ years later, I think we should be more generous with compiling packages. Compiling is quick, especially if it's already been done, and so the default behaviour should probably be compiling all the dependencies anyway.

This should be resolved as part of 2.0, which does a lot of other dependency-resolving stuff.

[wilfwilson]

Compiling is quick, especially if it's already been done, and so the default behaviour should probably be compiling all the dependencies anyway.

Maybe, but also we seem to be increasingly using PackageManager in package CI (woohoo!), and there I think it is reasonable to not want to needlessly compile things that don't need to be compiled (since these tests get run thousands and thousands of times).

I don't have a specific comment to make other than just wanting to make sure you bear in mind the use-case "using PackageManager in GitHub Actions CI" when you're developing the package 🙂

[mtorpey]

I'll bear this in mind!

2.0 is still coming along (and with a semester of no teaching I expect to release it by Christmas). I think a good solution here is a user option called something like compileDeps, which is true by default but can be set to false by users according to preference. 2.0 will have a nice clean system of user options, and this should be easy to implement.

[wilfwilson]

I can NOT wait