State of the Guildhall 2013

[Ian Price]

Hello Guilers,

So, it's a month late, but it's about time I gave an overview of the
state of the Guildhall, and the plans for the year.

For most of last year, rather than a maintainer, I've been a
babysitter, and focused more on packaging and popularising. So, the
state of the codebase is pretty much as it was this time 6 months ago.
I was hoping in part that Andreas would find time to start work on it
again, but I don't think this is likely to be the case, and so it's
time to roll up my sleeves.

I have started looking through the tracker, and have started making
tentative fixes on my local machine.

** Missing features

There are a number of important features that have either not been
implemented or are not well-documented. The most obvious of these is
support for mixed and non-Scheme packages, in particular, C is
frequent partner in Guile code, and needs to be properly handled and
documented. This is probably the most important thing that needs to
get done this year.

Also important, is having guild build and install documentation for
guile programs. If you have plain text documentation, this is already
handled, but I think we should also handle _at least_ info, maybe
skribilo too. I figure this will mostly fall out of the work on C,
since that too will require invoking client-side programs.

One other feature I'd like to do if I find the time is being able to
use source repositories as guildhall repositories.

** The site

The lack of a site for submitting user packages is a horrific example
of my procrastination. The plan was to appropriate the software behind
Marmalade and use that to run Guile, but its maintainer Nic Ferrier
has been somewhat vocal about its many problems on #emacs, and is to
rewrite it (in Elisp, no less).

Overall, people seem happy with the way the site works, and so it
might be worth it to try and emulate it, while doing our own rewrite
it in Guile.

I don't consider myself much of a web developer, and would love it if
someone out there who was could either spearhead this, or at least
continually prod me with an electronic stick into getting this up and
running.

Andy has recently informed me that we have access to space on the gnu
servers where we can host an official instance once this is done, but
I think I'd still like to keep an unofficial one running under my own
domain.

If I were to set an optimistic estimate, I'm guessing maybe May.

** Conclusion

So, that's the plan of attack. I haven't tried to make it too
ambitious, since my powers of procrastination are great :)

If you feel anything is missing feel free to reply, or perhaps better,
make an issue in the tracker.

I'll have a separate post this evening detailing what the new packages
are since last time.

[This was originally a blog post, but I've posted this to the mailing
list since no-one reads my blog :)]

-- 
Ian Price -- shift-reset.com

"Programming is like pinball. The reward for doing it well is
the opportunity to do it again" - from "The Wizardy Compiled"