Re: [PATCH] Add ".guile.sls" and ".sls" to the default %load-extensions

[Andreas Rottmann]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Hi!
>
> Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> One option would be to return to Aubrey Jaffer's model (used in SCM),
>> where a catalog of modules and their locations is maintained
>
> Hmm, I never really liked that.  And it’s quite an uncommon model.
>
>>> (I’m not sure if searching for a file name with no extension is
>>> intentional.  Ideas?)
>>
>> I looked into this.  Guile has searched for file names with no extension
>> since its initial import into VCS in 1996 (0f2d19dd).  Initially, names
>> with no extension were searched _before_ *.scm, and this logic was
>> hard-coded into the search procedure (try-module-autoload in
>> boot-9.scm).  Jim Blandy introduced the '%load-extensions' variable with
>> default value ("" ".scm") later in 1996 (26544b96), and Mikael Djurfeldt
>> reversed the order to (".scm" "") in 1999 (0a74e31d).  It has been that
>> way ever since.
>
> Woow, thanks for digging it up.  Now we should find out what these guys
> had in mind *before* Guile was first put under version control.  ;-)
>
> Anyway, I still don’t know what to do with .sls.  But the fact that R7
> may come up with its own extension makes me think that maybe we should
> just forget about that extension, as everyone will eventually do.   Hmm?
>
Putting my dorodango hat on, Guile currently provides all mechanisms to
make use of the .sls convention.  A potential --r6rs option seems like a
misnomer to me, due that it would implement an informal convention, not
something really specified in R6RS.

If such an option (maybe under another name) would be added, it would be
effectively just an abbreviation for the right -x command-line options.
Thus it is insignificant to dorodango, since it has to install a
launcher shell script for each program anyway, and whether that shell
script can become a few characters shorter doesn't matter.

What is (relatedly) *indeed* lacking is a way to make native libraries
take precedence to the third-party libraries installed by dorodango.
This would be addressed by making the $GUILE_LOAD_PATH (and
$GUILE_LOAD_COMPILED_PATH) mechanism to not only prepend, but also
append to the compiled-in load path, as implemented by the patch I
posted [0].

[0] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2012-11/msg00056.html
-- 
Andreas Rottmann -- <http://rotty.xx.vu/>