Re: updating guile-tools: no more --scriptsdir

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès)
() Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:21:48 +0200

   I've never actually used that option, but can you provide
   rationale for removing it?  I'd rather not remove it without a
   good reason to do so.

It's not useful (you said it yourself).  I bet that if we were to
omit the removal of this misfeature from NEWS, no one would even
notice.  (Same goes for --guileversion and --help-all, which are
next up on the chopping block.)

For a preview of where i imagine official Guile's guile-tools
should go (not far), please find attached the Guile 1.4.1.118
variant.  In terms of (re-)design rationale, the idea is to move
away from gratuitous variability:

 [It was (sort of) nice that guile-tools could be used to mux
  (dispatch) other functionality, but that sort of flexibility is
  available by more standard means (e.g., set PATH env var).]

and towards reliable reflection:

 [Many programs dispatched by guile-tools useful for maintaining
  packages (config/build/install) have an invocation context of
  either the configure script (produced by autoconf) or a makefile
  (possibly, but not always, produced by automake).  So, it's a
  good idea to mesh well w/ the autoconf spirit of probing
  features (instead of simply version numbers).]

I hope this explains the thought behind the 1.4.1.118 guile-tools,
which is the basis for this set of proposed (and to be proposed)
changes.

You can see the 1.4.1.118 guile-tools in action in Guile-PG's
configure.in (unreleased, see <http://www.gnuvola.org/wip/>),
lines 51 and 52, for example.

thi

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guile-tools.in
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