raco¶

ID: raco
Home page: https://docs.racket-lang.org/pkg/
Platforms: 🐧 Linux · 🍎 macOS · 🪟 Windows
Operations: installed · install · upgrade · upgrade_all · remove
purl types: pkg:raco
CLI name: raco
Issues and PRs: 📦 manager: raco
Source: meta_package_manager/managers/raco.toml

Bundled package-manager definition shipped with mpm.

raco is Racket’s command-line tool, whose pkg subcommand tree is the package manager for the Racket catalog.

Parsing notes, verified against Racket v9.3 on macOS:

raco reports no version of its own: raco --version is refused outright with “A flag must follow a command”. raco ships with Racket and is versioned with it, so the probe reads the interpreter beside it.
The listing forces --all and --long, and both are load-bearing. Without --all raco hides auto-installed packages behind a summary line, “[1 auto-installed package not shown]”, so an inventory would silently omit every dependency pulled in on the user’s behalf. Without --long the checksum column is truncated with an ellipsis, which would report a mangled version rather than none at all.
Versions are the 40-character checksums raco pins each package to; the catalog publishes no release numbers, so the checksum is the identity. Anchoring the pattern on forty hex characters is also what makes it skip the column header, the [none] placeholder of an empty scope and the two scope banners, none of which a line-count-based skip would survive if Racket reordered them.
An auto-installed package is flagged with a trailing * on its name, which the pattern strips so the id round-trips into install and remove.
Both scopes are listed at once, the installation-wide tree and the user-specific one, which together are what the machine holds.
install and update force --auto. Their default dependency mode is search-ask, which “asks for permission to auto-install” and would hang mpm’s non-interactive subprocess; --auto is the documented shorthand for --deps search-auto, the same resolution without the prompt.
No search: raco pkg has no catalog query verb.

What `mpm` adds to `raco`¶

mpm reaches across every manager at once, not raco alone: mpm installed and mpm outdated cover raco alongside every other manager you run in one table, mpm upgrade --all updates them together, and mpm sbom exports the whole machine as one bill of materials.

Every mpm command also gains --dry-run and --plan previews, cross-scheme version comparison and purl identifiers. See manager augmentations for how each one is built.

Your `raco` commands, in `mpm`¶

You already know raco: each operation maps one-to-one onto mpm, in an interface shared by every manager.

To…	With `raco`	With `mpm`
List what’s installed	`raco pkg show --all --long`	`mpm --raco installed`
Install a package	`raco pkg install --auto <package_id>`	`mpm install pkg:raco/<package_id>`
Upgrade one package	`raco pkg update --auto <package_id>`	`mpm --raco upgrade <package_id>`
Upgrade everything	`raco pkg update --all --auto`	`mpm --raco upgrade --all`
Remove a package	`raco pkg remove <package_id>`	`mpm remove pkg:raco/<package_id>`

Prefix any command above with --dry-run to simulate the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Operations¶

Operation	Supported
`installed`	✓
`outdated`
`orphans`
`search`
`install`	✓
`upgrade`	✓
`upgrade_all`	✓
`remove`	✓
`sync`
`cleanup`
`doctor`

Selecting and configuring `raco`¶

Deselect raco for a single run with --no-raco, or persist the choice in your configuration:

[mpm]
raco = false

Keep it enabled but tune how mpm drives it with a per-manager override:

[mpm.managers.raco]
timeout = 900

mpm config-template raco prints every overridable attribute as a ready-to-paste block.

Recipes¶

A few jobs you would otherwise script around raco, one mpm command each:

Snapshot and clone a machine: mpm --raco dump raco.toml, then mpm restore raco.toml on the next one.
Export a compliance SBOM: mpm --raco sbom (CycloneDX by default, --spdx for SPDX).

Privilege escalation¶

mpm runs this manager as the current user and never prepends sudo by default. Flip the policy for its privileged operations with --sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

None of its operations needs root.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown¶

State of raco’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

Status: ❌ None

A cooldown only pays off where a compromised release can be withdrawn while the clock runs, and can only be emulated where the registry dates its releases. From the retraction table:

Registry: Racket package catalog
Retraction: Index revert: pkgs.racket-lang.org maps a package name to a source checkout and a checksum rather than hosting the code, so withdrawal is the catalog entry being removed or repointed; the source repository it names can also vanish underneath it
Publish date: ❌ a package is pinned by the 40-character checksum of its source rather than by a release number, and the catalog publishes no upload date the client can read

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.

Version probe¶

The version is probed by running:

$ racket --version
Welcome to Racket v9.3 [cs].

and extracted with:

r"Racket v(?P<version>\S+)"

Reference traces¶

Raw native outputs captured in the bundled definition: the reference mpm’s parsers were written against. If you know raco well and a transcript below looks wrong, or a newer release changed its output format, report it.

$ raco pkg show --all --long
Installation-wide:
 Package[*=auto]            Checksum                                    Source
 base*                      6272bda442d1c26a40d2403a251665d500147ab3    (catalog "base")
 racket-aarch64-macosx-4    4c09d8fd50131e48edb3d5a5e95016ca31435da0    (catalog "racket-aarch64-macosx-4")
 racket-lib                 62eb15ddc03bc26a1c0f85c8aff03aa6ef7a518a    (catalog "racket-lib")
User-specific for installation "9.3":
 [none]

Feed any of these through mpm and the raw output becomes one uniform table, the same shape for every manager: filter it, project columns, or export it (mpm --raco installed --output json, or csv, toml, yaml), each package carrying a purl and a version comparable across managers.

Changelog¶

8.0.0.dev0 (unreleased)
- Add Racket’s raco pkg as a bundled definition, with installed, install, remove and upgrade support. The listing forces --all, without which auto-installed packages are hidden behind a summary line, and --long, without which the checksum standing in for a version is truncated. Mutating operations force --auto, their default dependency mode asking for permission interactively.