Subject: Re: bug#10488: guile-config deprecation?

From: Andy Wingo <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 09 Mar 2013 11:28:21 +0100

Hi,

On Sun 03 Mar 2013 08:01, Thien-Thi Nguyen <[email-masked]> writes:

> () Andy Wingo <[email-masked]>
> () Sat, 02 Mar 2013 19:42:19 +0100
>
>    I pushed it to a branch a year ago but it never got review.  Here's
>    the patch, rebased and attached.  I'll commit it soon if there are no
>    objections.
>
> Not an objection, but a suggestion: If the purpose of the code is to
> select a Guile version, why not call it guile-sel.m4 (or somesuch),
> and distribute it alongside guile.m4?

With parallel installation, there is no obvious global choice of which
version of Guile is the right one.  Projects should choose, explicitly.
A guile.m4 update will adjust the default search order, but projects
should probably also bundle a copy of guile.m4 to prevent bug reports
about inexplicable autoconf errors.  So even if the system guile.m4 is
updated, a typical project's choice of version does not change.

There is also the difficulty that Guile provides two APIs: one for C and
one for Scheme.  When guile.m4 goes to look for the details of those
APIs (e.g. the guild binary, and the libguile library), they need to
come from the same Guile installation.  For this reason guile.m4 should
be aware of which choice the user has made, and have an easy way of
correlating C and Scheme API.

Andy
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