Re: Guile V1 vs. V2?

[Martin Neubauer]

On Tue, 21 Dec 2021, Valentin Petzel wrote:
Hello,

> Hello Mike,
>
> Guile 1 to Guile 2 did change some syntax and some mechanics, which means that 
> guile code must be reworked for guile 2 and using guile 2 makes the program 
> much slower. There is ongoing long time effort to port Lilypond to guile 2 and 
> eventually 3 which does make progress, but for the time being using Lilypond 
> with guile 2 is not recommended.
>
> The way FreeBSD handles this seems to be a bit bad. One can very well have 
> different guile versions one one system, and Lilypond can be compiled with it's 
> own embedded guile version.
As I wasn't involved with the decisions I can only speculate as to why 
things were done the way they are now. Probably nobody was expecting guile 
1 to still be around almost a decade later...

Anyway, I started work on making the different guile ports able to 
coexist. See https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=260960 for 
progress there.

Building lilypond with guile embedded probably is an excellent approach 
for a standalone package, but attempting to do this within the ports 
framework promises to be a rather distasteful experience. (This isn't 
meant as a criticism of lilypond nor the ports collection. It just goes 
against the core principles of having a comprehensive package repository 
in the first place.)

> So you should probably report this to the system/package maintainers.
No need if the maintainer is already on this mailing list (although not 
particularly active these days...)

> Cheers,
> Valentin
>
> 21.12.2021 05:48:20 Mike Andrews <udsd007@gmail.com>:
>
> > Greetings. This is intended primarily for the folks who build packages for 
> > FreeBSD. 
> >
> > I recently installed the current LilyPond on FreeBSD 12, using the pkg command 
> > to install a precompiled set of binaries and other files. One of the 
> > prerequisites was GNU Guile V1. I had some other packages installed which used 
> > Guile V2; those packages and Guile v2 were deinstalled, which was inconvenient 
> > at best. 
> >
> > Is there a particular reason to specify Guile V1, and to not use Guile V2.* ?
As Valentin stated above, while there has been quite significant progress 
with support for guile 2 lately, guile 1 still has the official blessing 
as standard version for lilypond. If you don't mind building your own 
package, the port already has the option to use guile 2 instead. At some 
point in the (probably not too distant) future I the default will 
definitely change, but right now I'm still hesitant.

> > Best,
> >
> > Mike Andrews
> > Tired old sysadmin
I hope this wasn't too discouraging.
All the best,
Martin

PS:
For giggles, the lily configure script does some dubious stuff:

checking for guile-2.2... yes
checking libguile18.h usability... no
checking libguile18.h presence... no
checking for libguile18.h... no

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