Mark, I agree with everything you said about dependencies. I think the real solution is something like what you said - sharing code, but bundling.
One way to push that farther would be to distribute tarballs that include the complete source of some libraries, and somehow making a combined build system that configures and builds all of them. I would nominate libgc for this, since we keep hitting trouble with new or old libgc versions. Noah On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Mark H Weaver <m...@netris.org> wrote: > Hi Andy, > > Andy Wingo <wi...@pobox.com> writes: > > > On Sat 09 Feb 2013 16:12, l...@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes: > > > >> An issue with the FFI is distros where .la and .so files are only > >> available in the -dev package, because then ‘dynamic-link’ won’t work > >> unless that -dev package is installed (as recently discussed on > >> guile-user.) > > > > I have the feeling that we should implement our own dynamic-link > > function without libltdl. It would eliminate a dependency and allow us > > to use other search path rules, like ones that could deal with this > > case. I think the situation would actually be better on other > > architectures because we wouldn't have to deal with bugs like this one: > > > > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.guile.bugs/5269 > > The problems we're having with libltdl are likely affecting many other > projects. Wouldn't it be better to fix these problems in libltdl, to > the benefit of all its users, than for each of its users to duplicate > its functionality within their own projects? > > More generally, I'm concerned with the direction we are being pressured > into by those who complain about the number of dependencies. We ought > to look for better solutions than duplicating library functionality > within Guile's own source code. Imagine if every program did that. > That way lies madness. > > IMO, we ought to look for better solutions for those who complain about > dependencies. One idea is to provide precompiled versions of Guile for > the major platforms (i.e. MinGW, MacOS and possibly also GNU/Linux) with > all dependencies included, for use by libguile-based projects that wish > to provide precompiled bundles for their users. It might also make > sense to provide something along the lines of jhbuild to make the build > job easier for those who want more flexibility. > > What do you think? > > Mark > >
