rethinking Base.package_list

[StefanKarpinski]

Package list is currently a map from absolute file paths to a floating-point load time:

julia> using DataFrames

julia> Base.package_list
["/Users/stefan/.julia/Reexport/src/Reexport.jl"=>1.400267862075036e9,
 "/Users/stefan/.julia/StatsBase/src/StatsBase.jl"=>1.400267862131899e9,
 "/Users/stefan/.julia/SortingAlgorithms/src/SortingAlgorithms.jl"=>1.400267864475314e9,
 "/Users/stefan/.julia/GZip/src/GZip.jl"=>1.400267864386872e9,
"/Users/stefan/.julia/DataFrames/src/DataFrames.jl"=>1.400267862040832e9,
"/Users/stefan/.julia/DataArrays/src/DataArrays.jl"=>1.400267862631807e9]

This made sense originally, but it's a bit weird now. This should probably be a map from package names to the file that was loaded, maybe paired with its load time. It should also be exported with a name like LOADED (to correspond with LOAD_PATH).

This is coming up now because I want to close the package interactions issue and the natural way to do that would be to have a map from package names to thunks to call and just let the programmer manipulate that map. Something like this:

LOAD_HOOKS["Color"] = function()
  # stuff to do when the Color package is loaded
end

[IainNZ]

Is this map how you keep track of the sequence packages were loaded?

[StefanKarpinski]

It used to be used to decide whether to reload something or not but we don't do that anymore (it never worked very well anyway).

[vtjnash]

Is it coincidence that I was working on #6195 tonight (which is a version of LOAD_HOOKS which avoids needing to use eval, so it should be possible to statically compile the result)?

[vtjnash]

related: #12381

[StefanKarpinski]

Has been rethought in the sense that it's gone.