Re: Should guile-3.0 cond-expand guile-2 and guile-2.2?

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi Rob,

(+ Cc: Andy.)

Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org> skribis:
>>
>>>   $ guile-3.0 -c '(display (cond-expand (guile-2.2 "?\n")))
>>>   ?
>>>
>>> Is that intentional?
>>
>> I think so, though I don’t think this was discussed here.
>>
>> The way I see it, it means that guile-3 is a superset of 2.2.
>
> OK, though that wasn't true for guile-2.2 with respect to 2.0?

Oh, but there was not ‘guile-2.0’ symbol, right?

> In any case, it'd be nice to have the policy documented, perhaps on
> the srfi-0 info page.

Agreed.

> At the moment, I just needed a way to write code that behaved
> differently with 3.0+ as compared to 2.2, because 2.2 doesn't support
> define-module #:re-export-and-replace, and there's no functional
> equivalent yet.
>
> For now I did this (I don't currently care about older than 2.2):
>
>   (define (re-export-and-replace! . names)
>     (cond-expand
>       (guile-3.0
>        (module-re-export! (current-module) names #:replace? #t))
>       (guile-2.2
>        (module-re-export! (current-module) names))
>       (else
>        (module-re-export! (current-module) names #:replace? #t))))
>
> And migrated all the relevant symbols out of the define-module form.
>
> Do we think that the norm will be for releases to cond-expand the
> symbols for all their ancestors (up to some point)?  i.e. guile 4 will
> likely cond expand guile-3, guile-3.0, guile-3.1, ... and guile-2,
> guile-2.2, and so on?

My interpretation is that ‘guile-2.2’ is to be interpreted as “2.2 or
any later backwards-compatible version [at a language level]”.

Thus, what ‘guile-4’ will mean will depend on the compatibility story of
4.0 wrt. to 3.x.

Ideally I guess we’d want to express things in terms of minor/major
version (in)equalities rather than plain symbol matches.  One can
actually do that with a ‘syntax-case’ macro looking at ‘minor-version’
etc., but that’s inconvenient.

Ludo’.