Re: What is needed in guildhall to include it in Guile?

[Panicz Maciej Godek]

Hi Arne!

2016-02-22 16:08 GMT+01:00 Arne Babenhauserheide <address@hidden>:

Hi,

In january there was a thread here about Guildhall with the notion

> I encourage you to hack on Guildhall to make it more usable for your
> needs.

I finished my PhD last month, so I have some freed-up time — and I would
like to use some of it to hack on Guildhall and make it ready for
inclusion in Guile.

However there’s one stumbling block: I don’t see what’s actually missing
from it. So I want to be bold and request something:


Please tell me what’s missing in Guildhall, so I can implement it.

I'm glad that you wrote about this topic.

I admit that I haven't used neither Guildhall nor Guix, but from what I've seen in other languages, I think that while perhaps some packages depend on additional toolchains, I think this doesn't concern the pure Guile/Scheme modules, it is absolutely sane to have a "language-specific package manager".

I think that perhaps it would need to focus on community -- I would like to have a place where I could keep my modules easily for me and other people to use -- similarly to github, but focused specifically on Guile/Scheme. I

I think it would be awesome if there were some statistics concerning the popularity of modules, as well as an on-site possibility to report bugs and surprising behaviors.

Another thing that I believe would be cool is if there was absolutely no need to install the packages -- that the invocation of (use-modules) would fetch them (with dependencies) from the remote server (and verified as needed).

A controversial thing is whether to use the Guile module system or R6RS. I personally don't like the latter too much, but perhaps it is a question of integrating it nicely with Emacs (after all, it would be a big win for the whole Scheme community if the package manager could be ported to other implementations, and the packages could be shared -- as in the case of SNOW packages[1])

Best regards,

Panicz

[1] http://snow.iro.umontreal.ca/