On 2016-07-18 12:52:24 +08, Nala Ginrut wrote: > I happened to try guile-gnome few days ago, seems not workable with > 2.1, I'm using the latest master. Anyone ever tried it?
Yes, with the same bad results. It is hard for me to tell where the issue lies, since many of its dependent packages fail their self tests, although work with my own simple tests. The whole autoreconf setup for added modules seems to get broken with every development releases. Some packages seem to require multiple reconfigs before they build. Tests break with errors like not being able to exec "/bin/sh", which I can never seem to trace back though the garbage Makefiles the autoconf system generates. When I do things with my own driver Guile scripts the test code seems to work just fine. I don't understand why Guile modules use such a patchy environment when if you are building them you know there is a perfectly good Guile already built, which better understands it own build environment, and can find out what it needs to know with pkg-config and if really necessary, building its own C tests. Simple packages like guile-lib now fail tests even without need for C tests. Yes, work has been put into autoconf to make it very powerful, but like most pure macro based environments the output is fragile, and almost unreadable by most mortals. I have on occasions been able to fix some configure setup, but usually at the expense of a great deal of time (and frustration), and inability to test it on all the required environments, or even understand what the required environments are. I don't use MS-Windows, Atari, or some long obsolete Unix like systems. Knowledge of such should really be part of the tools, not part of the developers working knowledge. For me, the hardest issue in Guile updates seems to be patching all the autoconf environments of other peoples packages, most of which I needed to wait for some more skilled hacker to come along and decide to do it. I have no problems with fixes to the actual Guile code, on the rare cases such problems exist. I love Guile. It does a great job of extending, sustaining, and documenting, its *embedded* functionality, but user contributions are far too difficult to export and integrate. The solution should not be to integrate everything, but make adding new user contributions easier. Something like Setup.py or (even better) Haskell Cabal/Hackage. *Not* something like Emacs packages. -- Barry Fishman
