Re: role of guile-lib

[Neil Jerram]

2008/12/25 Julian Graham <address@hidden>:
>
>>> But it does raise the question of what the proper role for guile-lib
>>> is, given that no one seems to have touched it in more than a year.
>>
>> What do you want to do with it?
>>
>> A few different options come to mind:
>>
>>  * Include (parts of?) it within Guile itself. This probably would
>>    require copyright assignment, though perhaps not, if we put them
>>    within a contrib/ section of the source distro (I would not want to
>>    put `contrib' in the module name, however).
>>
>>  * Make it a part of Guile, but not a part of the guile source
>>    distribution. This way all Guile committers could administer it, and
>>    perhaps it could just share the same mailing lists.
>
> I like that second option (although it doesn't do anything for
> cross-Scheme compatibility), and I'd imagine it'd go over better with
> Guile developers than making it part of Guile itself.

Apart from the need for copyright assignment, and wanting to avoid
making incompatible Scheme API changes, I personally see no problem
with gradually rolling more and more Scheme library code into the core
Guile.  It doesn't AFAIK seem to have hurt Emacs to do this, and it's
a massive convenience that when you install Emacs, everything that you
might need is just there.  (Even including massive subsystems like
Calc.)

On copyright assignment, I'd like to know if there are other GNU
projects with "contrib" sections where assignment isn't requirement;
anyone know?  Avoiding incompatible changes just means that stuff
should only be rolled in when its (believed to be) ready.

>> Yes, and another option (parallel effort?) is to hack in support for
>> R6RS modules, and rely on other distributions.
>
> Hey, sure -- although we'd still need a way to locate modules.  And
> could we actually rely on other distributions?  My outsider impression
> is that there was a minor revolt when R6RS was passed (but maybe the
> library system was less offensive to people?).

IMO no; I'd say the library system is one of the more offensive parts
of R6RS.  Even so, I wouldn't object to someone trying to hack in a
way of loading R6RS libraries into Guile.

Regards,
        Neil