Re: Thinking about the next stable release

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le 22/05/2022 à 15:39, David Kastrup a écrit :
> Jonas Hahnfeld via Discussions on LilyPond development
> <lilypond-devel@gnu.org> writes:
>
> > The reason I'm explicitly looking at Debian is that they currently
> > bundle Guile 1.8 in their package, which also serves as the basis for
> > Ubuntu's package. I'm sure they would be more than happy to get rid of
> > that 😉
> Once it is bundled, it isn't all that maintenance-heavy.  You'd probably
> need to update with the 1.8 branch tip of Guile maintained by Thien-Thi
> Nguyen (and/or report if it doesn't compile any more with up-to-date
> Texinfo/GCC/whatever).
>
> Getting it in certainly was quite a bit of work.  Getting it out and
> redepending with Guile-2.2 will be more work.  Particularly since the
> current version of Guile isn't 2.2 any more.



As far as I can see, Debian has both 2.2 and 3.0 currently.

https://packages.debian.org/sid/guile-2.2
https://packages.debian.org/sid/guile-3.0

In Archlinux, the Guile package is at 2.2.7 and it doesn't
even look like they currently ship Guile 3.0?

https://archlinux.org/packages/?sort=&q=guile&maintainer=&flagged=

In Gentoo, Guile 3.0 appears "masked"
https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/dev-scheme/guile
which from
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Knowledge_Base:Masking_a_package
doesn't look like they would like it if we depended on it.

Fedora also has Guile 2.2:

https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/guile22/guile22/

Homebrew too:

https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/guile@2#default

MacPorts' Guile package is 2.2:
https://ports.macports.org/port/guile/
and it doesn't even look like it has Guile 3:
https://ports.macports.org/search/?q=guile&name=on

I am not under the impression that everyone would
applaude if we switched to Guile 3.0.


Also, I'm using Guile 3.0 for development (because byte-compilation
is a lot quicker), and it works ok, but it has a big bad bug:
it doesn't print source locations when byte-compiling. Last time
I looked, it seemed easy to fix that, but it is literally impossible
to get a patch applied. See
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2022-05/msg00000.html

Also see

guile$ git shortlog -ns --since="2 months ago"
     2  Timothy Sample
     1  Ludovic Courtès
     1  Mikael Djurfeldt

On the other hand, if you look at cross-module inlining
introduced in Guile 3.0.8
<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2022-02/msg00030.html>
the amount of instability that new Guile 3.0.x versions
can introduce is just scaring.

Given that the development of Guile 3.0 is introducing
instability and not fixing it, I would be cautious with
switching to that release series. If people assume
"works with Guile 3.0.x" and think the latest patch
release is the best, as is usual, we're in trouble on the
day a Guile 3.0.x release comes that breaks us.

Take that with a pinch of salt, as I'm not overly familiar
with versioning strategies in distros.


Jean