Re: guix repl and ice-9 modules

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Hello Todor,

Todor Kondić <address@hidden> writes:

> ... which leads to a question, why is there no readline anymore? I notice it 
> is a separate package in guix. Is this a guix decision, or a new development 
> in guile?
>
>
>
>
> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
> On Monday, 9 September 2019 09:55, Todor Kondić <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> Oops, my bad. After a closer inspection of %load-path, I noticed
>> that guile modules are indeed there, however the one module that I
>> tried to load (ice-9 readline) seems not to be in the distro
>> anymore.
>>
>> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
>> On Monday, 9 September 2019 09:47, Todor Kondić via address@hidden wrote:
>>
>> > Is it normal that I can't load ice-9 modules from within guix repl ? 
>> > Because, this is the default behaviour on my hybrid system (guix on top of 
>> > pop-os (ubuntu) ).

Please remember to use top-bottom posting; this convention is used on
the Guix mailing lists and makes it a bit neater to follow :-).

The answer seems to lie in the choice of the license. Guile was licensed
as LGPL, perhaps to better compete with Tcl, which was on the rise at
the time.  GNU Readline is GPL.  As such, you cannot distribute Guile as
LGPL if you include GPL code in it (it'd need to be GPL as a whole
then), hence the separation into different packages.

Maxim