More batteries included

[andrewbaxter]

Bouncing here from Ammonite, and I thought it might bear mention.

My use case for scripting is stuff like operating system glue and local automation, like boot scripts setting up mount points or device links, or analyzing packet captures when I switch ISPs and my internet inexplicably stops working on my old router.

A huge part of why I'm using Python instead of anything else is that it's batteries included with command line parsing, json/base64, http requests (as painful as they are), subprocess management, etc. Is there any way this could be supported here? Like a "scala-cli-plus" with a bunch of common libraries bundled?

FWIW which libraries aren't really an issue, I'm using some pretty terrible standard library Python things because what matters there is not using bash... for the same reason I'd use Scala CLI instead of Python. Pre-creating a cache isn't really an option, or at least if I'm going to do something like that I might as well just compile.

[bishabosha]

did you know about the --toolkit option/directive? it adds scala toolkit to the classpath - including libraries for processes/io/http-requests

[andrewbaxter]

I just tried it without --offline to see what it did, and it started downloading the toolkit. So I guess the default versions listed in --with-toolkit are what it downloads if you don't specify --with-toolkit, and --with-toolkit is a way to avoid the download?

Unfortunately I don't think this makes the distributing-offline-scripts story particularly easier... in order to use a script on a system I need to make sure scala-cli is available plus scala, plus the toolkit jar, and make sure all the scripts include shebang flags to pass in the path of scala and the toolkit jar (I assume?).

[bishabosha]

So did you also read this documentation on the Scala CLI website?

so yes scala toolkit is a maven dependency see here. There is another discussion currently about this "How to install scala-cli without internet" - perhaps we should make a command that makes it easy to bundle all necessary libraries for a given command/project to succeed.

[bishabosha]

when scala 3.5.0 is released then its scala command, based on scala-cli, will bundle all the libraries to compile code with Scala 3.5.0 offline - but we didn't consider including toolkit in that offline bundle so far

[andrewbaxter]

So did you also read this documentation on the Scala CLI website?

No, I hadn't seen that either! I googled around for more information on the toolkit and couldn't find anything, although I guess I was probably looking more for reference type stuff.

I tried --toolkit default just now and same behavior AFAICT. Is that the same as not specifying it at all?

"How to install scala-cli without internet"

I saw that and it seemed relevant, but I guess the issue was more of a low level one in the end?

when scala 3.5.0 is released then its scala command, based on scala-cli, will bundle all the libraries to compile code with Scala 3.5.0 offline - but we didn't consider including toolkit in that offline bundle so far

Oh yeah, that sounds interesting. Would that still require a mutable system or storing the bundle somewhere? If it'd be useful I'd be glad to make an issue.

[bishabosha]

I tried --toolkit default just now and same behavior AFAICT. Is that the same as not specifying it at all?

if you don't specify that (and don't add any explicit dependency) then you shouldn't be able to use a toolkit library in code