Subject: [bug#54021] [PATCH] question -> answers

From: Frank Pursel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2022 13:45:58 -0800

Julien,

I missed the JavaScript in the synopsis, my fault; I did get the one in the
description.

Why the older version?  A couple of reasons.  First, is that I'm trying
to address the problems that have been pointed out with my earlier
patches for a ditaa package.  'ditaa' has a sequence of dependencies
that lead to the version of rhino I've packaged.  I looked at the latest
version too (because that would certainly be a good thing) but newer
releases of rhino have transitioned to the gradle build system.  I have
experience with ant that I can use but none, yet, with gradle.  Plus,
and this may be naive, I thought it might be a good experiment (perhaps
even better for guix) to see if a guix transformation based on this ant
build could build one of the later rhino versions that otherwise would
require gradle.  I may pursue such experiments later after I achieve my
first goal, which is to package ditaa.  I also think there is a risk
that the latest version of rhino will not work with ditaa as the one we
are packaging does.

If I can suceed with rhino and my more recent submission of xalan then I
will have a clean build of batik that will allow ditaa to be built
properly using only guix quality, built-from-source, libraries.  That is
my current small guix ambition.    

Regards,
Frank