Re: Future of ice-9/slib.scm.

[Greg Troxel]

  How important is it that 1.6's behavior with respect to older versions
  of SLIB (versions that already worked) remain unchanged?  Certainly
  someone already using guile 1.6.7 successfully with some older version
  of SLIB might not be happy if 1.6.8 no longer worked with their SLIB
  install.

A good question.  While I'm generally in favor of backwards
compatibility, I suspect that people tend to upgrade slib without a
lot of issues (other than this one).

  One very strict way to approach this would be to do something like
  this in ice-9/slib.scm:

    (if (detect-older-slib?)
      (load-from-path "old-slib.scm")
      (load-from-slib "guile.init"))


An easier approach is to put in the if, but with *use-old-slib-init*,
define that to #f, and put in NEWS to set that to #t if trouble.  That
gives people a low-grief way to recover, but without a lot of
guile maintainer time.

I would expect that as long as the older slib version has the
define->define-public hack then the guile.init that came with it would
work fine.


-- 
        Greg Troxel <address@hidden>