Re: Squile resurrected

[rm]

On Wed, Jan 31, 2001 at 06:24:46AM -0800, Peter C. Norton wrote:
> Its a bad name unless you have as a design goal a general sql interface.  I
> would, for instance, like to see gnome-db wrapped by guile and have that
> called guile-sql (and I don't mean the gui part, but the bits that do the
> database connectivity and querying).

I agree about the choice of name. There was discussion about 
using gnome-db as a general interface to DBMs on the guile-db
mailing list a while ago (the list seems to be rather dead these
days). While this sounds like a resonable way to go  i  have to
admit that i wouldn't be happy with this. My (personal) experience
with the usage of gnome libraries leave me with rather mixed feelings:
while there are a lot of great ideas and a lot of enthusiasm i hardly
ever encountered code that was anywhere close to being stable. I don't
mind running unstable code on my developing box, but somehow none
of the libraries i tried so far ever hit the 'stable' point. 
Gnome-db had all sorts of dependencies on unstable libs. It also
needed a full blown CVS version of the Gnome desktop, something i
would never dream of installing on an exposed server.
Same thing with guile-gtk: for the last few days i'm trying to get
the CVS version to compile--without success so far. I don't really
see why the guile gtk bindings depend on 'gnome-autoconf.sh'.
(back down from the soap box): I think a more scheme-ish layer
arround DBM-access would be a wounderfull thing (tm). Perl DBI
seems to work pretty well for the average perl programmer, so
mimiking DBIs functionallity might be a good starting point.

Ralf Mattes