guild hall, R7RS, and the name

[John Gabriele]

Hi,

There's been some discussion recently at the scheme-reports ML about a
distributed module repository. Would a guildhall be necessary if there
were a central R7RS module repository (duplication of effort)?

If so, what sort of interaction would there be (if any) between
guildhall and an R7RS repository?

Incidentally, a while back I emailed Andy about the name "Guild Hall",
and thought it might be useful -- if only for posterity -- to
reproduce that email here. Please see below:

***

Hi Andy,

Just poked my head into the guile-devel ML and noticed your recent
post about Guild:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2011-06/msg00026.html

This is very exciting news! So glad to hear there's movement in
getting a cpan-alike going for Guile. :)

Regarding the choice of name, I think "Guild" sounds pretty good:

* goes well with "Guile" (and GNU),
* has some nice connotations (craftsmanship, union),
* will make for interesting styling of the future Guildhall website
(wrought iron maybe?), and
* "join the guild" & "contribute to the guild" have a nice ring to them.

For better or worse, the name might make people think of
[D&D](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_and_dragons) though.

The only name I think I might like better is "Galley" (the kitchen
area of a ship), because:

* good analogy: a galley contains food (like a package repo contains packages)

* like "guild", "galley" also goes nicely with the names "Guile" and "GNU"

* it doesn't have the D&D feel to it that Guild/Guildhall might

* naturally leads to some cool expressions: "You need package X? Have
you checked the Galley?", "What's cookin' in the Galley today?" (that
is, recent uploads), "if your package isn't deemed ship-shape (by a
kwalitee-checking `ship-shape` script?), it won't be allowed in the
galley", etc.

* can get some mileage out of nautical/maritime (or Pirate! ;) ) theme
for the Galley site

* upload packages via a `stock-the-galley` tool?

* ooh, various helper scripts named after "Love Boat" characters:
Stubing, Bricker, Gopher, Isaac ...? (Oh no, did I actually type that
out loud?)

Arrrg matey, sorry for the bikeshedding! :)

***

---John