From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic =?iso-8859-1?Q?Court=E8s?=) Newsgroups: gmane.lisp.guile.devel Subject: Re: User perception on backward compatibility Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:04:02 +0100 Message-ID: <87bpgnqwb1.fsf@gnu.org> References: <87y6jrzq10.fsf@gnu.org> <77066.87604.qm@web37908.mail.mud.yahoo.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1264090085 7643 80.91.229.12 (21 Jan 2010 16:08:05 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:08:05 +0000 (UTC) Cc: guile-devel@gnu.org To: Mike Gran Original-X-From: guile-devel-bounces+guile-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Thu Jan 21 17:07:58 2010 Return-path: Envelope-to: guile-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1NXzXD-0003Jo-Nn for guile-devel@m.gmane.org; Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:05:28 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:39303 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1NXzXE-0005Ah-Ku for guile-devel@m.gmane.org; Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:05:28 -0500 Original-Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1NXzW3-0004Z0-Nh for guile-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:04:15 -0500 Original-Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1NXzVz-0004W3-8r for guile-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:04:15 -0500 Original-Received: from [199.232.76.173] (port=38567 helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1NXzVy-0004Vn-OM for guile-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:04:10 -0500 Original-Received: from mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr ([192.134.164.82]:7872) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS-1.0:RSA_ARCFOUR_SHA1:16) (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1NXzVx-00084E-RO for guile-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:04:10 -0500 X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.49,318,1262559600"; d="scan'208";a="47002356" Original-Received: from laptop-147-210-128-170.labri.fr (HELO nixey) ([147.210.128.170]) by mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP/TLS/DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA; 21 Jan 2010 17:04:07 +0100 X-URL: http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/ X-Revolutionary-Date: 2 =?iso-8859-1?Q?Pluvi=F4se?= an 218 de la =?iso-8859-1?Q?R=E9volution?= X-PGP-Key-ID: 0xEA52ECF4 X-PGP-Key: http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/ludovic.asc X-PGP-Fingerprint: 83C4 F8E5 10A3 3B4C 5BEA D15D 77DD 95E2 EA52 ECF4 X-OS: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu In-Reply-To: <77066.87604.qm@web37908.mail.mud.yahoo.com> (Mike Gran's message of "Thu, 21 Jan 2010 07:09:39 -0800 (PST)") User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.1 (gnu/linux) X-detected-operating-system: by monty-python.gnu.org: Genre and OS details not recognized. X-BeenThere: guile-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: "Developers list for Guile, the GNU extensibility library" List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: guile-devel-bounces+guile-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: guile-devel-bounces+guile-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.lisp.guile.devel:9906 Archived-At: Hi Mike, Mike Gran writes: > Guile's API has always fairly incompatibly from revision to=20 > revision. Each rev always requires a significant rewrite of the glue > code in Guile-using projects. s/revision/major version/. Fortunately, major versions are pretty rare, but I get your point, of course. > Just in the time that I've been using Guile, I've used four different=20 > functions to convert an integer into a guile number: gh_int2scm,=20 > SCM_MAKINUM, scm_int2num, scm_from_int. That=E2=80=99s partly because until 1.8, and to a lesser extent now, there = has been a poor separation between the internal API and the public API, along with incomplete documentation. I think 1.8 has been a noticeable improvement on both fronts, and we can probably do better (=E2=80=98SCM_INTERNAL=E2=80=99 and the GNU ld version script are good tool= s to formally separate public from private APIs and version them.) > A lot of projects have their own Guile compatibility layers to map > current practice to a consistent API: AutoGen, Geda, even Gucu. > > Maybe we need a gnulib-like project for guile ;-) Heh. > So, yeah, reducing incompatibilities might be nice. I sympathize and encourage people to report (and fix) incompatibilities introduced in 1.9. :-) Looking at http://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/nixpkgs/guile2test already gives a good idea of things to look at. Thanks, Ludo=E2=80=99.