Re: Adding to the end of the load path

[Noah Lavine]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Noah,

 

Hello,
 

In general, I think the idea of requiring people to write scheme code to
manipulate %load-path (and other settings) is a fine approach.  Maybe
you're right that this is better than adding a bunch of new environment
variables. 

However, neither init.scm nor ~/.guile is sufficient for this job.
init.scm is site-wide, and generally only editable by root, and ~/.guile
is only run by interactive REPL sessions.  So to do as you suggest, we'd
need to add another user-specific file that is read when initializing
guile, even for non-interactive sessions.

Ah, I didn't realize that was an issue. I was modeling this on what Emacs does, but it doesn't run in batch mode very much. Three configuration files with different meanings seems like a lot, but there's no other way that preserves backwards compatibility. Maybe we could use the $XDG_CONFIG directory for it (not that I like their default value).

 

Also, note that this still doesn't solve our immediate problem regarding
Guildhall and SRFIs in a backward-compatible way, so we still need to
support the "..." marker for the next 7-8 years, unless someone has a
better suggestion.

I see your point, but leaving it like this doesn't fix anything that isn't already broken; is that right? If so, I think we could justify saying that people need to upgrade to get the new behavior, especially if the complexity of supporting old versions is high.

Noah