Re: Fixing the slib mess

[Andy Wingo]

Hello Mikael,

A pleasure to see you around!

On Mon 22 Oct 2012 01:11, Mikael Djurfeldt <address@hidden> writes:

> When trying to use guile 2 for logic programming I discovered that the
> slib interface is again broken (and has been for quite some time).

I am very sorry that I did not see this thread before hacking on this
recently.  Somehow over the past three or four months I just managed to
drop everything and the inboxes filled without being filtered or drained
in any way -- and to attack that I decided to just run through
individual lists in order.  A strange strategy, but it is good for
honing the "does something need to be done about this or can I drop it?"
instinct.

Anyway I picked up something in the user list about Slib, looked into
it, and then decided to fix it, without having seen this mail --
resulting in the recent patches to Slib CVS and Guile git.  I'm sorry to
have stepped on your toes here.  In any case I didn't check it
thoroughly, so surely there are issues yet to resolve.

> The implementation of the interface has two sides.  One, the file
> ice-9/slib.scm, is owned by Guile.  The other, slib/guile.init, is
> owned by slib.  slib has such .init files for some common scheme
> implementations but I early on noticed that that the guile.init file
> is not really maintained.  I decided that it would be more robust if
> slib.scm incorporated most of the interface so that it would be easy
> to update it as Guile changed.  But of course slib also changed and at
> some point others felt that guile.init should contain most of the
> interface and the bulk of slib.scm was moved there.  As we have seen,
> this didn't make things much better.

Yes, in many ways I would like to have the interface in Guile.  However
it seems that time has shown that it really wants to live in slib --
probably because that's where people care most about slib.

At least with Guile 2 we have managed to clean up many of the version
dependent hacks, by just delegating to a fresh file for Guile 2.

Anyway.  Perhaps I did the wrong thing in fixing it this way?  I would
be very happy to commit anything you have.  Please take a look at both
Slib and Guile from their version control systems, and the recent patch
about `include'.  Aubrey seems quite responsive in dealing with patches,
so if there is a change to make, I'm sure we can get it in.

> *But*, the proper implementation of syntax-toplevel? requires
> modification of psyntax.scm and adding it to the (system syntax)
> module.

Do you have a new patch for this one?

Regards,

Andy
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