Worrying development

[Roland Orre]

At the moment I'm somewhat in a crisis how to continue with guile.

When such a fundamental function as shared substrings were removed from
guile 1.6 to guile 1.7, without being replaced, I see a serious risk
here for a split and do as Thien-Thi Nguyen.

OK, guile 1.7 is a development version so I should not rely on it,
on the other hand, as we are using guile as our main tool for analysis
we do of course also want to adapt to the development version to be
able to utilize facilities which are only available there.

I see this as an important policy issue and I quickly need to decide
how to go further. One way is of course that I patch specific parts
of the code, as in the shared substring case tags.h, strings.c and
gc.c. This is, however, also a risky thing to do, and it means more
maintainance work for every new version.

I suggest that shared substrings are moved back to guile. It is quite
serious when something which has been promoted in the reference manual
and which can not trivially be fixed in user code, is removed.

        Roland Orre