Re: Patches for module/ice-9/occam-channel.scm

[Noah Lavine]

Hello,

I talked some more with the maintainers. In general, everything that
goes in should have tests and documentation. This module isn't
documented to begin with, so you shouldn't have to fix that to
contribute (although of course we'd love that :-) ). However, we would
like tests for your changes, so we can catch regressions in the
future. Take a look in test-suite/tests for examples of how those
work.

Since these are relatively large changes, you'll also need to do a
copyright assignment. We assign the copyright on Guile to the Free
Software Foundation because under US law, the owner of a copyrighted
work is sometimes the only person with the power to sue over
violations of copyright. The FSF wants to be able to sue if people
violate the GPL, so we assign copyright. Please see
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html for more information, or
email address@hidden to fill out a form.

Thanks a lot for contributing,
Noah

On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 5:33 AM, Daniel Krueger <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> I myself don't know much about the foundations of the module itself, I
> only know it should be really the same as occam's channels, but I
> don't know much about them. I just found the package and thought it
> would seems to be useful. And as I tried to use it I found the
> incompatibilities and fixed them. So I just know how this
> implementation works, but not very much about the background.
>
> I could do some documentation, it's just that I never documented
> something in this info(?) format. I'll try it and send some patches,
> you can then look if it's okay ^^
>
> - Daniel
>
> On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 3:17 PM, Andrew Gwozdziewycz <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 11:18 PM, Nala Ginrut <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> Well, I think it's something like Actors but little different.
>>> And I think it would be nice if there's a document for it.
>>
>> It's a foundational part of actors, more than actors themselves.
>> Actors need some sort of "mailbox" to communicate with the outside
>> world[0]. Channels provide a type of mailbox. I assume by the name,
>> the semantics of the channels provided in occam-channel, closely
>> resemble those in the Occam programming language. I believe the
>> semantics of Occam channels are based on C.A.R. Hoare's CSP[1].
>>
>> [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model
>> [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_processes
>>
>>> On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 10:58 AM, Noah Lavine <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> Thanks a lot for submitting them! Micro-commits are exactly what we want.
>>>>
>>>> These patches raise an interesting issue. I do not use occam-channel,
>>>> and in fact I have no idea what it does since it has no documentation
>>>> and no tests.  Normally I only reply to emails if I think I know
>>>> enough to give an intelligent response, but in this case no one else
>>>> is replying either. This might be wrong, but it's entirely possible
>>>> that no one except you on this list has any way to check that these
>>>> are correct. (Or if they do, the people who know are not replying.)
>>>>
>>>> So I propose this: if no one replies to this email in two days, I will
>>>> merge the patches.
>>>>
>>>> And I hate to ask you for more after you've already contributed, but
>>>> if you are able, could you write some documentation or tests for this
>>>> module? It could badly use both of those things.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks a lot,
>>>> Noah
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 8:42 AM, Daniel Krueger <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> I've done some work on (ice-9 occam-channel) and fixed the module
>>>>> exports, the alt macro and extended it a little bit. Here are the
>>>>> patches, but they are all just micro-commits, I hope that is okay.
>>>>>
>>>>> - Daniel
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> http://www.apgwoz.com