Re: guile-gtk?

[rm]

On Sat, Jul 14, 2001 at 10:11:30PM -0400, Ariel Rios wrote:
> On 14 Jul 2001 05:09:56 -0700, Bill Schottstaedt wrote:
> > We're having real trouble here building guile-gtk; with the
> > current Guile and version 0.19, it complains about scm_listify; with the
> > 0.21pre gnome cvs version, it wouldn't build even with the
> > following set of tools:
> [...]
> First of all thank for your interest in gnome-guile and guile-gtk.
> The problem is that the version pre version you pulled is not a 
> guile-gtk version but a gnome-guile one. I have only made
> a gnome-guile 0.21 pre version.
> You should go to CVS and get guile-gtk and not gnome-guile.

Ok, i just deleted my guile-gtk directory and did: 

| bash-2.03$ echo $CVSROOT 
|  :pserver:address@hidden:/cvs/gnome
| cvs checkout guile-gtk
| ...
| bash-2.03$ cd guile-gtk
| bash-2.03$ ./autogen.sh
| ./autogen.sh: /usr/local/share/aclocal/gnome2-macros/autogen.sh: No such file 
or directory

Hmmm. I don't want to start flame wars or unreasonable complaints, but 
to me there seem to be some fundamental problems with the current
status of the guile-gtk bindings. From the documentation and
public anouncements one could read that guile-gtk provides guile bindings for
the Gtk widget set (and nothing more). Yet it seems impossible to build
it without a working gnome (2?!) build system arround. I Ariel as the
maintainer decides that this is a wise way to go that's perfectly
fine with me, but a) this should be mentioned in the documentation/website,
maybe the name of the package should be changed to something like 
guile-gnome-gtk
to reflect the nature of the bindings (but then, where is the difference
to guile-gnome?).
Given the intention of guile being a scripting language that should be used
by application builders (like  Bill Schottstaedt) this is unfortunate since
a developer must either: 
 - install a gnome2 built environment. Looking at the nightmareish dependencies
   (my personal opinion) this is a bould task (looking at some recent Linux
   publications i don't seem to be the only one who feels uneasy about this).

 - use guile-gtk 0.19. But this forces the application programmer to
   use guiles deprecated API. 

I think suggesting that  Bill Schottstaedt (or others) should commit code
instead of complaining misses the point. Isn't the whole rationale behind guile
to ease the live of developers who need an embeded language? Mr. Schottstaedt
has done a terrific job on his programs and i fear that he might move to other,
easier to embed languages (snd allready supports python as well as ruby and has
an experimental MzScheme binding) which would undoubtly be a loss for the guile
community. 

What _is_ the apropriate form to express such concerns? To me it seems that
growing interdependencies start to become a real problem (have a look at the
gnucash mail archives or do 'ldd /usr/local/bin/guppi ... ;-)
I've been in the same situation as Mr. Schottstaedt (probably way more angry so 
:)
and am glad that someone with his reputation brought up this subject.

 Ralf Mattes

> > and now I can't even access the www.ping.de site!  Surely
> > it shouldn't be this hard?  Perhaps someone not married to
> > Gnome should handle this package.
> 
> I am in love with GNOME and Scheme. Does that makes me a bad
> maintainer?
> 
> ariel
> 
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