Re: Guile 1.8 / Viper System Interface

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

klaus schilling <schilling.klaus@web.de> writes:

> Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> [1:text/plain Hide]
>>
>> () David Pirotte <david@altosw.be>
>> () Fri, 26 Jun 2015 16:36:30 -0300
>>
>>    > Sorry, you got me wrong. This is an announcement thread for
>>    > those interested.
>>
>>    None of us is interested in guile-1.8, please use guile-2
>>
>> I'm still interested.  If the new fork can handle all the stuff
>> (w/o breakage) at: <http://www.gnuvola.org/software/> then i
>> have nothing against it.
>
> Didn't Lilypond and Texmacs experience troubles with guile-2.0? At leats in the
> latest Debian editions (Jessie), Lilypond depends on the 1.8 libraries,
> not 2.0, but perhaps it has been fixed?

You wish.

Some recent demotivators for the porting effort from the GUILE bug
database:

<URL:http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=19883>

Read through the entire communication, with the background being that
GUILE developers have several times offered to help with the GUILEv2
migration but went silent whenever a branch to work on and instructions
were given to them.

In short: GUILEv2 garbage collection has problems reproducible outside
of LilyPond, potentially affecting any application using the documented
hooks for organizing memory.  GUILE developers think that they might be
problems with the Boehm Garbage collector but it does not appear anybody
can be bothered submitting something upstream.

<URL:http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=20302>

In short: GUILEv2's only documented way of dealing with binary in-memory
ports is broken.  No work on a fix can be seen, the suggested temporary
workaround (which does not do the trick in LilyPond itself but figuring
out just why and then producing another simmered down example is rather
hard) is slated to be disabled in version 2.1 at the latest.

I'm the only one working on GUILEv2 migration and I do have a low
frustration tolerance meaning that after enough discouragement I work on
other things.

Getting more GUILE developers involved is non-trivial since my only way
of communication is the bug tracker as I'm prohibited from posting on
the developer list.

<URL:http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2012-06/msg00116.html>

And not all that many people regularly read the bug tracker.

> (Texmacs seems to have become non-free.)

Uh what?  <URL:http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/about/license.en.html>, and
I don't see much of a way it can go anywhere else.  I could imagine that
parts of its documentation are GFDL (which might cause a non-free
classification according to Debian rules).

However that may be, its development certainly seems to have come to a
stop mostly.  Certainly no GUILEv2 in sight for it, and that may be
reason for a removal from Jessie just like LilyPond will likely soon be
subjected to.

-- 
David Kastrup