[Chicken-hackers] importing modules of not yet loaded extensions

[Moritz Heidkamp]

Fellow Chickeneers,

when investigating the problem described in ticket #450, Christian and I
had a discussion about whether it makes sense to be able to import
modules for which the extension defining them has not yet been
loaded. In the situation described in the ticket this was the case with
the posix extension. This might suggest that it's just some core unit
oddity but it does indeed work with modules defined in eggs, too. Just
try to run csi -n and (import chicken-doc) or any other egg you happen
to have installed and you'll notice that all necessary .import.so files
will be loaded but, of course, no binding will be imported at all. Thus
I figured it may make sense to make importing modules which aren't
actually loaded signal an error or at least output a warning to catch
problems like this early on. It may be that I am misunderstanding
something about import's purpose. However, we could not really settle
for a satisfying explanation or solution. Any comments?

Moritz