Re: CPAN for Guile

[Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>]

On Mon 07 Mar 2011 21:13, Andreas Rottmann <a.rottmann@gmx.at> writes:

> I'm (very slowly) working on getting dorodango[0] to work on Guile.  In
> principle, nothing in Dorodango is inherently tied to R6RS -- it should
> very reasonably be possible to use it for Guile-specific packages as
> well.
>
> [0] http://home.gna.org/dorodango/

Looks very nice, and well thought-out.  Dorodango would be an excellent
starting point.

Alaric Snell-Pym gave us an overview of Chicken's system here:
http://rotty.yi.org/irclogs/freenode/#guile/2011-02-10/#e212

I agree with him that one of the most important aspects about
CPAN-alikes is the social one: how the system enables the hack, and with
what flavor.  For example right now Guile has a tight center, enforced
by the stability needs of Guile, as well as the copyright assignment
policy, then a wide-orbiting set of comet- and asteroid-like libraries.
A good CPAN-alike would smooth this out into a gradient of more and less
experimental hacks, to enable participation of folks with useful
libraries, but which don't need to be in Guile proper.

It would be good to also think about modules' test suites,
documentation, code coverage, code analysis and such, and be opinionated
about that.

It would be interesting to have the ability to add on, as an additional
source of code, repos with portable R6RS code.  I wonder how this would
affect us socially though.

Anyway, just words into the ether.  Happy hacking!

Andy
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