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Re: development goals (was: [PATCH] Avoid `SCM_VALIDATE_LIST ()')


From: Han-Wen Nienhuys
Subject: Re: development goals (was: [PATCH] Avoid `SCM_VALIDATE_LIST ()')
Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2008 12:38:19 -0300
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 (X11/20080723)

Andy Wingo escreveu:
>> I am not using and enhancing GUILE primarily for fun.
> 
> Then why do it?
> 
> I'm serious.

Because I take my (LilyPond) users serious. 

OK - I will admit that interpreter/GC hacking is cool, but on the
downside, when I try to do anything, the intertia/resistance I feel in
the community here is a big turnoff for me.

>> I feel using GUILE has been a big mistake -especially considering the
>> amount of time I sank into it.  I seriously looked into moving lily to
>> mzscheme, but I lack the bandwidth to do that now.
> 
> FWIW, I would like to run my code on other schemes -- not the same goal
> as this one, but it overlaps considerably. For me, I think that the path
> will be implementation of some scheme standard that supports modules,
> then migrating code over to that standard. I'm not sure about R6 though.

Is there a Rx/SRFI standard for modules? I always thought that module 
system(s) was one of the unspecified areas.

>> I hope you can understand that I have a somewhat different basic
>> attitude wrt GUILE development.
> 
> I understand your frustrations, believe me. But excuse my being blunt,
> but these frustratons seem to have made you bitter and confrontational.

FWIW, I have always been a bit confrontational.

> All attitudes are not equal. This one is not the best for Guile.

I think Guile does not have any desire to be anything. Therefore "best
for Guile" does not exist; it is the people that develop it and the
people who use it who have desires.

I am probably the only person who is in both camps currently.

When working with the devs here I continue to be puzzled by what the
objectives are.  For instance, we had 5 major (stable) releases in 11
years.  I have always wanted this rate to go up, and have tried argue
for that, but with 1.10 (or 2.0, whatever it is called) being in
preparation for 2.5 years at this moment, I don't see this changing.

At such a glacial pace of development, you would imagine that backward
compatibility would not be a concern - after all, who plans for
compatibility over a five year span, yet Guile continues to support
(by default!) the GH interface which was deprecated in 2002 (or was it
with version 1.4 in 2000?).

For LilyPond (and any other package that uses Guile, eg. texmacs,
snd), this is a problem, since we can not realistically ship anything
that requires the latest Git/CVS version to work.  Hence, my
improvements in LilyPond are held back by Guile's release scheme.  For
example, I wanted to use SCM rationals for various purposes in Lily
for a long time, but had to wait for the 1.8 release before I could do
this.

If anything, my impression so far is that the objective is to produce
a piece of perfect code (with pretty linear history graphs and GNU
compliant commit messages!) without a desire to actually ship
anything.

So, what are the goals in this group?

-- 
 Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen





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