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Re: The TTN dilemma (was Re: guile-www)


From: Thamer Al-Harbash
Subject: Re: The TTN dilemma (was Re: guile-www)
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2004 22:56:52 -0700 (PDT)

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Chris Hall wrote:

> Thanks for taking the time, I've been very curious about this.

My worry is that I misrepresent facts and anger people who are
otherwise contributing.

> How long has this been going on, roughly speaking?  Is there a thread
> somewhere that I could read to catch up on the discussion?

Not that I know of. I've seen small spats break out but nothing
to bring this matter to any kind of closure. Then again what kind
of closure can we expect?

> By 'his fork', do you mean 'his fork' of guile-pg, 'his fork' of
> guile-www, etc.?

AFAIK TTN used to work on the official guile. Then he forked his
own code hosted on his site. This includes any bindings he
writes. The problem is he's productive and he doesn't say
outright when making announcements that his code is not
compatible with guile 1.6

> The little bit I can glean as to the 'why' of the fork from TTN's 'glug'
> web page is that 'the fork' was *because* of a backward compatability
> issue?

I'm guessing he didn't like the SCM changes. guile went through
some major changes between 1.4 and 1.6

> Does anyone else find it ironic (as well as a PITA) that this seems to
> have led to many more, but undocumented, incompatabilities?

Absolutely. I actually considered moving to other
interpreters. It's just a bad thing for the community. Seriously,
I'd like to contribute _without_ the politics. The second people
start acting deceptive is the second I lose interest. guile is
good without all the bindings. You can usually roll these as you
go :)

> Do the guile-pg-0.19, and perhaps the recent guile-www as well, require
> a 'TTN-built' tool chain of some sort?

I know his guile-sdl uses a different tool chain. His own.

> At least, the guile-pg install - it seemed to build OK - was *totally*
> broken - it created directories off the '/' dir instead of where they
> were _supposed_ to go, and said they would go, and then couldn't find a
> new 'postgres-sup' lib, even though it had just installed it!

Heh. Sounds like his fork is getting more and more
incompatible. I used guile-pg some six months ago. There was a
version which worked fine with the official guile. The only
problem it had, which I remember, is grokking the inet address
values that pgsql supports. It was a simple fix when I fixed it.

> From what I can see in the guile-pg-0.19 distribution materials, there
> is absolutely no mention of possible imcompatabilites, nor on the web
> site where I got the tarball - I just checked again.  There is a _lot_
> of install-related stuff, but no mention of incompatability that I could
> see.

Nail. Hammer. Head.

> I am also beginning to get the feeling that ttn is a 'community of one'
> - is this correct?

Can't really say. He's been assimilating bindings from people who
abandoned the code and converting them to his guile
distribution. Whether anyone actually uses his fork or not is
another question.

The only way to solve this is to have an effort to take all his
code and make it compatible. It's a lot of effort, and work which
is better spent _doing_ things with guile. Patching someone elses
bindings to be compatible is one massive waste of time. You could
probably re-write most of guile-pg in one night.

Here's a problem though, and I'd love it if someone could tell me
how to solve it. If I wrote a guile-pg, guile-sdl, and a bunch of
other bindings, how do I take the namespace back from TTN?
Writing bindings isn't very hard and I have some spare time this
month.

-- 
Thamer Al-Harbash
GPG Key fingerprint: D7F3 1E3B F329 8DD5 FAE3  03B1 A663 E359 D686 AA1F




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