Re: summer of code ideas

[Noah Lavine <noah.b.lavine@gmail.com>]

Also, about your CPAN for guile (CGAN?) idea - it seems like with what
you said about stowfs that what you're looking for is similar to Nix,
but used to install Guile packages. (www.nixos.org)

Do you think it would be useful to just compile a version of Nix with
a different root directory, make some Guile bindings, and use that?

Noah

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 2:51 PM, Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> We need to get together a few Guile-proposed projects for SoC students
> to hack on.  How about we collect them here in this thread.  I'll kick
> it off with one idea:
>
>  * A CPAN for Guile.  My initial thoughts are that you want a
>    combination of APT-like discovery and download of sources of
>    software, and a stowfs-like local storage, allowing you to update a
>    tree of symlinks in $XDG_DATA_DIRS/guile/2.0/ to add packages, roll
>    back changes, etc.  See
>    http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html
>    for more on $XDG_DATA_DIRS.
>
>    C extensions are outside the scope of this project.  IMO a CPAN for
>    Guile should not compile C helper libraries.
>
>    You can start here by doing a survey of what other schemes do:
>    chicken and racket being the obvious ones, and also perhaps taking a
>    look at cabal and other CPAN-alikes developed in the last 10 years.
>
>    You'd need to define a format for code -- tarballs or something.
>    You need to think about signing too, and the possibility both of
>    dumb servers and smart servers.  You'll need to write a web client
>    in Guile, if one hasn't been written yet.  In short, a large project
>    for an ambitious and careful hacker!
>
> Regards,
>
> Andy
> --
> http://wingolog.org/
>
>