Re: (ice-9 base64)?

[Aleix Conchillo Flaqué]

Hi Maxime!

On Tue, Aug 16, 2022 at 12:04 PM Maxime Devos <maximedevos@telenet.be> wrote:

On 16-08-2022 19:21, Aleix Conchillo Flaqué wrote:

On Tue, Aug 16, 2022 at 9:59 AM Maxime Devos <maximedevos@telenet.be> wrote:

On 16-08-2022 18:10, Aleix Conchillo Flaqué wrote:

Hi,

In many projects I've been copying Göran Weinholt's base64 implementation and I've also seen it in other projects, would it make sense to include it in Guile's standard library? [...]

If we do this, we should contact the various other projects to make them use (ice-9 base64).

I think they could switch whenever they want (i.e. whenever this was added to Guile) or even not switch at all.

Sure, but they can't switch if they don't know about it. And if they don't know about it and hence don't switch, the proposal fails at its purpose of unbundling base64. Besides, we need them to switch (see Guix no-bundling policy and the reasons behind it) -- if upstream refuses to unbundle, then in our locally modified version for Guix.

Forgive my ignorance, but what do you mean by unbundling? I'm not familiar with Guix at all, well, just conceptually and for trying a few commands years ago.

But you are right that this would cause a backward compatible problem, but I guess that would depend on each project. Can we do conditional module loading? I've done this in the past with Python... if we are in Python 2 load this module, otherwise load this other one. So projects could do that.

Yes, using resolve-module with #:ensure #f & module-ref. Or with syntax tricks and (version), to decide things at compile-time.  Still, if you do a conditional module loading, you still need a fallback, and the fallback would still be bundling.

Cool, thanks! Again, I need a description for unbundling :-(.

Whether we simply replace (guix base64) by (gcrypt base64) depends on how old (gcrypt base64) is compared to the earliest 'supported' Guix for pull/time-travel, but even if it is not present in the old gcrypt, we can work-around that (we have a 'fake-gcrypt-hash' in build-aux/build-self.scm, so we can easily have a (define gcrypt-base64 [some copy])).  Or simply update the local guile-gcrypt in buid-aux/build-self.scm.

guile-gcrypt base64 is pretty new with the patch above (but no release after that), I have no idea if Guix has added anything else.

base64 is available in at least 0.3.0, which is packaged in Debian bullseye (which is considered "stable"), so not too new, though we might need to change build-aux/build-self.scm if 0.1.0 doesn't have base64.  Guix appears to have the pre-quoted-patch version, without changes of its own except for a different module name.

One more time, forgive me, but what is build-aux/build-self.scm?

OTOH a similar replacement can be done for (ice-9 base64), but transitioning to (ice-9 base64) would take much longer, at least until the various distributions are updated to a Guile that has (ice-9 base64), whereas (gcrypt base64) could be switched to immediately.

Maybe this could be handled by each project independently.

They wouldn't have to if the base64 module is put in (guile gcrypt).

And the last forgiveness... (guile gcrypt)?

Aleix