Re: getting started writing desktop applications

[David Pirotte <david@altosw.be>]

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Hello Barry,
Nala,

> On 2016-07-18 12:52:24 +08, Nala Ginrut wrote:
> > I happened to try guile-gnome few days ago, seems not workable with
> > 2.1, I'm using the latest master. Anyone ever tried it?  

> Yes, with the same bad results.  It is hard for me to tell where the
> issue lies, since many of its dependent packages fail their self tests,
> although work with my own simple tests.

Indeed. Guile-GNOME depends on G-Wrap and Guile-Cairo, and FWIW, note that all
compile and work fine with 2.0.11, 2.0.12 and up to 2.1.2.

G-Wrap fails with 2.1.3, because it uses a series of libguile.h functions marked as
deprecated in 2.2

I will try to solve this, but I have very little knowledge of the internals of
G-Wrap itself, so don't hold your breath: instead, if you can, use 2.1.2 or 2.0.12
of course.

> The whole autoreconf setup for added modules seems to get broken with
> every development releases.  Some packages seem to require multiple
> reconfigs before they build. 

I'm not aware of any of this, could you be more specific?

> Tests break with errors like not being able to exec "/bin/sh"

This is the symptom that you have a 'corrupted' environment, and the test suite can't
find guile and/or guild

> I don't understand why Guile modules use such a patchy environment when

What Guile modules?

> necessary, building its own C tests.  Simple packages like guile-lib now
> fail tests even without need for C tests.

This has been fixed, patched under revision: they will be pushed and guile-lib will
be released by the end of this month.

	https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2016-07/msg00055.html

In the mean time, you can use guile-lib: the make check failure is 'just' because
its autotool chain files have not been updated to require the tests to be serial.

Note that even after these 11 patches, the test suite will fail for 2 tests against
2.1.3: these concerns modules that are _not_ used by Guile-GNOME, I reported and
will personally not debug these, patch welcome:

	https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2016-07/msg00066.html

> Yes, work has been put into autoconf to make it very powerful, but like
> most pure macro based environments the output is fragile, and almost
> unreadable by most mortals.

AFAICT, there is no autotool chain related bug in Guile-GNOME, neither in Guile
itself.  Make check fails for Guile-Cairo for the same reason as it does for
guile-lib, but it works fine, just make check fails: I'll patch [I did locally] and
upload an unofficial release somewhere.

David.

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