Re: Libgettextpo wrapper for Guile

[Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>]

Hi Miguel,

> an external project would be useful anyway as
> does not require a version update of neither Gettext nor Guile to start
> using it

A separate project also means an independent release cycle.

How are other Guile bindings organized?
- guile-cairo         separate project   https://www.nongnu.org/guile-cairo/
- guile-gnome         separate project   https://www.gnu.org/software/guile-gnome/
- guile-git           separate project   https://gitlab.com/guile-git/guile-git
- libgccjit           separate project   https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/gccjit-guile/
- guile-gnutls        at gnutls          https://www.gnutls.org/manual/gnutls-guile.html
- zeromq              at zeromq          http://zeromq.org/bindings:guile-binding
- gmp                 part of guile      https://gmplib.org/manual/Language-Bindings.html

The majority seems to have chosen to be available as separate project.

> I think the choice should have more to do with Gettext's desire as a
> project to extend its code base in Guile in the future, as the Guile
> library could be the foundation for new tools, or to keep C as the main
> code base

There are no plans to use a different implementation language for
PO file manipulations. With the existing code base as a start, it
is not much harder to code new functionality in C than it would be
to code it in Python, guile, Java, or other languages.

Gettext needs a different implementation language in other areas -
such as extracting relevant information from HTML pages - and is
using POSIX sh for this purpose. It's a balance between language
features, portability, and ease of installation / minimization of
dependencies.

Bruno