On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> wrote:

> Hi Noah,
>

Hello,


> In general, I think the idea of requiring people to write scheme code to
> manipulate %load-path (and other settings) is a fine approach.  Maybe
> you're right that this is better than adding a bunch of new environment
> variables.


> However, neither init.scm nor ~/.guile is sufficient for this job.
> init.scm is site-wide, and generally only editable by root, and ~/.guile
> is only run by interactive REPL sessions.  So to do as you suggest, we'd
> need to add another user-specific file that is read when initializing
> guile, even for non-interactive sessions.
>

Ah, I didn't realize that was an issue. I was modeling this on what Emacs
does, but it doesn't run in batch mode very much. Three configuration files
with different meanings seems like a lot, but there's no other way that
preserves backwards compatibility. Maybe we could use the $XDG_CONFIG
directory for it (not that I like their default value).


> Also, note that this still doesn't solve our immediate problem regarding
> Guildhall and SRFIs in a backward-compatible way, so we still need to
> support the "..." marker for the next 7-8 years, unless someone has a
> better suggestion.
>

I see your point, but leaving it like this doesn't fix anything that isn't
already broken; is that right? If so, I think we could justify saying that
people need to upgrade to get the new behavior, especially if the
complexity of supporting old versions is high.

Noah