[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
> Hi,
>
> Neil Jerram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>> Well, in the big picture of Guile package development, both of these
>> concepts could be useful. If I'm understanding you correctly, I would
>> make the analogies that
>>
>> - a .la file is a bit like a formal list of all a package's
>> dependencies (which in practice might have to be declared by the
>> package author, or could be detected automatically by code analysis)
>>
>> - ld.so.conf is the environment information needed to be able to load
>> all those dependencies, which is distilled from the .la file.
[...]
> I don't see `.la' files as a cache of `ld.so.conf'.
Nor do I. It's the other way round. (If anything. Let's not get
hung up on the analogy, because it's not a very good one anyway.)
> You gave several good arguments against try to minimize `%load-path'.
>
> In fact, I think that the optimization that consists of
> minimizing/bypassing `%load-path' is not very valuable:
>
> 1. Practically, it seems that traversing even tens of directories to
> locate a file is cheap compared to actually evaluating code, and, for
> instance, marking and sweeping; ;-)
>
> 2. Just like `$PATH', `$LD_LIBRARY_PATH' and the likes, `%load-path'
> should is not supposed to contain a lot of directories; currently, it
> contains 4 items by default, and I guess people will rarely have more
> than 10 items in it.
Yes, agreed.
> As a conclusion, I'd still be in favor of a single file like this:
>
> [...]
Basically agreed, but what I now plan precisely is as follows.
1. /etc/guile/${GUILE_EFFECTIVE_VERSION}/load-path.scm
Contains the calculated load path, e.g.
("/usr/share/guile/1.6"
"/usr/share/guile/site"
"/usr/share/guile"
"/opt/gnome/share/guile")
2. Each Guile package installs a file under /etc/guile which contains
its load path as a single string.
3. guile-config is enhanced so that "guile-config calculate-load-path"
will recalculate load-path.scm from the installed package files.
Reasons for this arrangement:
1. I think it's nice to make what Guile does at startup as simple as
possible (even if it's not significant in performance terms).
2. Some distros/installers (such as that on the Nokia 770, to pick an
example out of the blue :-)) don't support the automatic execution
of a post-install script. The above arrangement makes things as
easy as possible for such platforms: they just need to run
guile-config manually after the install.
3. Advanced distros/installers may support coalescing the post-install
steps for multiple packages, which in this case would work very
nicely.
Regards,
Neil
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