Re: What can I do to help? (conclusions)

[Andreas Rottmann]

address@hidden writes:

> On Fri, Oct 04, 2002 at 08:26:05AM -0400, Dale P. Smith wrote:
> > > It's absolutely criminal that you could come and ask for a job to do
> > > and get turned away. There is so, so, so much to do. Shame on us!
> > > 
> > > I think there are a ton of projects that need to be done for Guile
> > > that are not yet done. For example:
> > > 
> > >     * A SAX2 parser GOOPS interface and drivers for libxml, expat,
> > >       xerces, etc.  (Whoever told you not to make it easy for Guile
> > >       developers to use XML is a bonehead, by the way. XML will never
> > >       be s-expressions, but that doesn't mean that using it isn't
> > >       important!)
> > 
> > That must have been me.  Yes, I'm a bonehead a lot.  Sorry.
> 
> No, you're not! Let's not talk about libxml-bindings for a moment
> (more on that in a later mail) -- the problem with the above mentioned
> things is simply: there's (almost) no documentation on how to do it.
> Yes, a GOOPS-ish guile-libxml would be great, but there _is_ currently
> no C goops interface. 
>
I always wonder why people say that... There is a goops.h, which
declares basically all the functions you need. Well, you could build
some higher-level/easier-to-use functions on top of them, and in some
areas there are no 'clean' bindings so you have to do a bit of
hackery, but I managed to implement a C++ interface to GOOPS - so it
*is* possible. It took me some hours of poking around in goops.c,
since the stuff is not really documented.

> Throwing such a task at a newcomer is "absolute
> criminal" :-) Oh, and i guess we shouldn't forget that libxml has several
> dozent functions and about two handfull of smobable objects (and a pretty
> tricky memory concept when it comes to guile bindings, if i might add).
> I agree on the comments on XMLs boneheadedness ;-)
> 
Hmm, you begin to provoke my interest. Maybe after my C++ interface is
mature enough (should be in a few weeks), I might give it a shot,
however, it would help me a lot to get going how you imagine the
interface to look like.

Talking about C++, I suggest adding configure flag that causes the
Guile interpreter to be linked by g++, so modules can be implemented
in C++. (Python, on Debian, for example is linked this way).

> > I had visions of Guile using xml as a doc format (and other horrors) and
> > responded without really reading your message.
> > 
> > Being able to interface with other systems using xml is a good thing and
> > needs to be done.  There is this stuff called soap that uses xml for
> > rpc's (iirc).
> 
> Yes, considering the fact that xml seems to be GNOMEs configuration format
> and the fact that many modern document formats are XML languages bindings
> are important (SVG, XSL-FO, MS-Office, StarOffice, etc.).
> 
I fully agree here, XML bindings are important.

Andy
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