Re: Blockers for Guile 2.2

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

Am Dienstag, dem 22.02.2022 um 16:55 +0000 schrieb Werner LEMBERG:
> [First of all: Thanks, Jonas, for releasing 2.22.2 today!]

[Well, I didn't do this alone, Phil does most of the actual release
procedure like editing the right files that both of us keep forgetting
and things like that]

> I guess most people like me lack the skills to give helpful comments,
> so they stay silent.  The only part where I can voice an opinion is
> the following.
> 
> > > Meanwhile, please take a look at reality: Linux distributions are
> > > switching to Guile 2.2 for LilyPond, no matter what the state is
> > > and what our documentation recommends.  Debian attempted to
> > > switch for the stable release 2.22.0 (that is now in Debian
> > > stable) and we convinced them to stick to Guile 1.8 more-or-less
> > > last minute. Arch Linux switched to using Guile 2.2 twice, but I
> > > was able to convince them that they should wait.  Gentoo has an
> > > option to build with Guile 2, not sure if it's used by default or
> > > up to the user. The package in Fedora continues to use Guile 2.2
> > > IIRC.
> > > 
> > > What this tells me is that we get a split user community if we do
> > > nothing.  If we want to avoid that and pro-actively test and fix
> > > issues, we have to switch *now* and lead the transition.
> 
> Jonas, you are doing a wonderful job by working on the Guile 2.2
> transition.  However, it seems to me that it will still take a
> significant time until we have something that can be used for daily
> work.

Even if I don't fully agree, what's your take then on the real
situation that I described? Isn't that even worse from a user's
perspective?

> Otherwise I could imagine to do the following.
> 
> (a) Incorporate Guile 1.8 into the LilyPond tarball to produce
>     releases without fearing that distributions eliminate LilyPond
>     packages.
> 
> (b) Produce development releases with Guile 1.8 for people in the (1)
>     group, probably with GUB.  Recent MacOS users would have to use
>     MacPorts.
> 
> (c) Produce development releases with Guile 2.2 for people in the (2)
>     group with Jonas' build system.
> 
> I'm not sure how much of my suggestion can be automated to reduce
> manual work on it.

This would basically freeze the current status of doing releases with
GUB - while I made sure the binaries with Guile 2.2 can be produced
from a tarball, GUB assumes that it's the authoritative release tool.
And (a) and (b) makes it necessary to keep GUB alive *and* precludes us
from making progress for all the reasons I mentioned on Sunday and
yesterday.

Jonas

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