Re: Minimal Guile

[Mike Gran]

> From: Mike Gran <address@hidden>
> 
> Hi-
> 
> Re point 2: hard to distribute.
>  
> A while ago I was looking at the idea of minimizing the number of
> files needed to ship Guile as a dependency.  At the time, I thought
> that one could retool the build so that it produced
> - a tar.gz of the distributable header files
> - libguile as a monolithic .so or .dll with no dependencies.
>   Dependencies would be wrapped into the monolithic .so or .dll.
> - all the compiled .go files as a tar file
> - and a Guile executable that used both of the above

I'm replying to myself.  LOL.  But I agree with myself that this
sounds like a good idea to me.
 
I think as soon as I get a spare cycle, I'm going to make an
experimental branch where all the core .scm and .go files are in
a single archive file that will act like a read-only filesystem.
 
It'll be fun to try to minimize it down to just
the guile executable, libguile-*, and a scheme archive file.  And it
might help with distribution of prebuilt versions.
 
To keep it GNU, I looked around to see what library-style GNU
solutions exist for treating an archive file like a filesystem.
Oddly, no good documented (L)GPL GNU options dealing with tar, cpio,
pax, or 'ar' in an API way.  But, there is a solution for .iso 
files: libiso9660 from GNU libcdio.
 
OK?  Any objections?
 
Thanks,
 
Mike Gran