Re: [screen-devel] GSoC 2015 and GNU Screen

[Mike Gerwitz]

On Sun, Sep 21, 2014 at 01:49:38PM +0200, Artur Skonecki wrote:
> I always fanced scripting for GNU Screen. In GSoC 2009 there was work done
> on scripting for GNU Screen which included Python and Lua. However it
> didn't got upstream.
> https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/details/google/gsoc2009/firemeteor/5668600916475904
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/screen.git/log/?h=scripting
> 
> Improving GNU Screen scripting was later mentioned as an GSoC idea at GNU:
> http://www.gnu.org/software/soc-projects/ideas-2010.html
> 
> Improving GNU Screen scripting is the problem I would preferably work on. I
> would like to make more capabilities available through scripting and
> stabilize it so it could be merged upstream.
> I am also open to other ideas.

I would like to see Guile integrated with screen. Not only is it GNU's
extension language platform,[0] but work is underway for providing Lua
support[1], which seems to be desired here. (Current language support
includes Scheme, Elisp, Brainfuck, and ECMAScript). Guile is language
agnostic;[2] I've seen discussions expressing interest for languages
like Python in the past as well.

The problem with introducing specific engines to handle Lua, Python, or
any other language is that we have separately maintained systems that
likely would require both separate bindings and runtimes for screen.
When I talked with Amadeusz last last year / early this year, he decided
to purge scripting support because it was (largely) unused and he was
the only personal actively working on any large-scale maintenance of
screen---so even if those languages were integrated, they still run the
risk of being dropped in the future. If development is picking up again,
then maybe it's a discussion that can be had again.

For example, I had begun rewriting the winmsg parser for
caption/hardstatus lines in C,[3] but I would much prefer to see
something like that implemented in Guile Scheme.[4]

[0]: 
http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Guile-and-the-GNU-Project.html

[1]: That said, the `lua' branch seems to have stalled for ~1yr, so
     perhaps you or others may be interested in killing two birds with
     one stone (forgive the morbid idiom) by improving Guile's Lua
     support, thereby introducing Lua to any software using Guile.

[2]: 
http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Supporting-Multiple-Languages.html

[3]: Can be found on Amadeusz' pre-maintainership dev repository
     here: https://github.com/amade/screen/commits/winmsg

[4]: 
http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Interactive-Programming.html

-- 
Mike Gerwitz
Free Software Hacker | GNU Maintainer
http://mikegerwitz.com
FSF Member #5804 | GPG Key ID: 0x8EE30EAB

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