summer of code ideas

[Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>]

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
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