Re: First look at Guile Std Library available

[Paul Jarc]

Richard Todd <address@hidden> wrote:
> It's standard practice to stay compatible along minor version
> numbers, and OK to break backwards compatibility across major
> version numbers.
...
> What do you think of (std ...) => (std2 ...) as a means of letting
> older code run forever?

It's doubtful that incompatible changes will happen to all modules in
this collection all at the same time.  Coercing them all into a single
version number/compatibility schedule doesn't seem helpful.

> Can it be that only Java/Python/Perl/Ruby need logging services, and
> scheme does not?

I don't think syslog is a good idea regardless of the language.  It's
more flexible to print logs to stdout/stderr; then it's easy to choose
another program to add to the pipeline for filtering and storing the
logs.

> I have said, and do believe, that it would be good to have a single
> library that provides the baseline infrastructure for doing useful
> work.

As long as the code exists, I don't think there's much benefit in
aggregating it.  It just has to be easy for users to find.

Of course, all this applies to all software, not just Guile modules.
So I think a Guile-only solution would be wasted effort.  We'd be
better off with language-independent version management and a software
directory that could be filtered and searched to find, e.g., a Guile
SMTP library.  slashpackage would be a good place to start.
<URL:http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html>


paul