Hi all,

Another status update on the construction of the guild hall.

Since my last update, I moved all of the commands down from under the
"guild hall" namespace, so that it's now "guild update", "guild
install", etc.  I also hacked a bit on the `guild' executable itself,
allowing "guild help FOO" to work, and generally making `guild' more
pleasant to use.

Unlike dorodango, which has both global options and command-specific
options (for example, "doro --global-foo command --command-bar"), the
guild commands only take command-specific options.  They also only take
the set of options that they need.  I have updated the manual with all
of the details; a text copy is attached below.

Another big change is that I renamed the package.  The problem was that
the package itself isn't really a "guild hall" -- it marks you as a
member of the guild, giving you access to various guild halls on the
net.  After some hemming and hawwing I renamed it to "sigil" -- a
graphic sign that marks you as a member of some group.  It's your guild
sigil?  I think I got the meaning of this wrong though and we might need
to change again.  The image I have in my mind is of the sign hanging
outside someone's shop.  They still have those here in Barcelona, in
some modern forms.  Maybe the mental image of an old signet ring still
works, though.

Anyway the rename did clarify the documentation, by separating the name
of the software package you install to enhance your `guild' command,
from the name of the online archive.

So those are the changes.  Now, the problems.  The biggest problem right
now is that I don't know how it's supposed to work, by default.  Should
I be able to "guild install foo" and then run guile, and import the
(foo) module directly?  That's not how it currently works, because it
installs to somewhere in ~/.local by default.  Should I be able to
install to the configured --prefix ?  Should that be the default?  If we
install to the --prefix, is it in a guild hall path or is it in Guile's
site dir?  Should programs installed by the guild be in the default
path?

Also, many upstream dorodango R6RS packages still wouldn't work, because
Guile doesn't do the .guile.sls / .sls thing by default.  I think Guile
needs an --r6rs option that enables that and other R6RS options.

Sigil doesn't currently compile files that it installs.  It probably
should.  It should probably recompile depending modules too, when
updating a package.

I feel like we should approach the problem from another direction for a
little while: to think about what the user should type, and how that
should enable the user to get their job done quickly and easily.

I hope to pin down Ludovic and other interested parties this weekend at
the GNU Hackers Meeting to see if we can make some progress here.  Sigil
itself is very close to being what we need, thanks mostly to Andreas'
fantastic Dorodango.  But we do need to continue thinking about our
Guile users there.

The code is here:

  https://gitorious.org/~wingo/dorodango/guildhall

To check it out, you can:

  git clone git://gitorious.org/~wingo/dorodango/guildhall.git

You'll need the latest Guile from the stable-2.0 branch.  Just run
autoreconf -vif && ./configure && make && sudo make install.   You can
make uninstall it later, that works fine.

Cheers,

Andy