Re: How to make GNU Guile more successful

[Vítor De Araújo]

Hi,

I'm relatively new to Guile and new to this list, but I saw this
thread in the archives and I'd like to make some comments.

First, I think it would be nice to have a Guile wiki, in the likes of
cliki.net. A publicly-editable reference place where people can share
knowledge about Guile and Guile libraries and projects. Sure, having a
centralized package manager/repository would be nice, but just having
a common place where people can look up what libraries exist and where
they can be downloaded would be nice. (I don't know how easy would it
be to set up a wiki at the Guile website.)

On the topic of package management, I think that, more important than
a central repository, is a standard format in which to distribute
packages for easy installation. I've never used guildhall, and I guess
it defines something like this, but I think just having an
installation command where you can pass the URL of a package to
download and install (say, guild install http://some.url/somepackage.zip,
or even a git URL) would already go a long way towards making it
easier for people to use third-party libraries in Guile.

(Or maybe package _names_ could be URLs pointing to an index in a
well-defined format, which tells how to download each version of a
package; then we could have even dependency management without a
central repository. I'm pipe-dreaming here, though.)

Best regards,

Vítor De Araújo

-- 
Vítor De Araújo
http://inf.ufrgs.br/~vbuaraujo