Re: Initial SCTP support for the upcoming 1.6.5 release

[Marius Vollmer]

Michael Tuexen <address@hidden> writes:

> Let me know what you think or if you have any questions.

I am now fairly convinced that we should not provide full support for
SCTP in guile-core.

The reason is simply that this support depends on libsctp which might
not be available.  Also, absence of libsctp is no good indicator that
the system does not support SCTP at all, the library might just happen
not to be installed.

We could make SCTP optional, but I really think that Guile's core API
should have as few optional pieces as possible.  Having to recompile
Guile just to get SCTP support is not right.

We could make Guile depend on libsctp, but that doesn't seem right
either.  libsctp is not essential to Guile in the way that libgmp is,
say.

Distributors such as Debian would have to decide whether to make Guile
depend on libsctp or whether to exclude sctp altogether.  Making SCTP
support an add-on to Guile avoids making this decision.