Re: Initial SCTP support for the upcoming 1.6.5 release

[Michael Tuexen]

Marius,

that is fine. I have a library version which I will release as
soon as 1.6.5 is released.

I think this also means that I can release new version of the
lib whenever I want. This helps me because there is then no
need to wait for 1.6.6 to get new features of the SCTP stuff
accessible via guile.

However, a Linux distribution which includes SCTP (in the
kernel or as a kernel module) without providing the libsctp
is definitely broken, but this might happen. And I do not
know if anyone is checking this. I'm not doing this, since
I'm focused on BSD and Mac OS X.

Because the code for the core and the lib is pretty similar
we can include the SCTP at any time later if things change
and you think it should be included.

Thank you very much for your support.

Best regards
Michael

On Sep 8, 2004, at 17:03 Uhr, Marius Vollmer wrote:

> 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.