Re: Modified load-path proposal

[Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.uklinux.net>]

steve tell <tell@telltronics.org> writes:

> Just a little note to say that I've been following along and am glad
> this is being discussed - and of course a few comments.

Thanks for both!

>> ludovic.courtes@laas.fr (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>>
>>> Because people haven't been doing so for years.  Some of us certainly
>>> don't want to iterate over each and every Guile module to add this line.
>
> I agree that an addition to the module-using or module-declaring forms
> should be avoided.

OK.

> This general guideline seems to be on the right track:
> Lots of tools seem to have grown foo.conf.d directories, probably
> because they're friendly to package managers.
>
> Would a survey of conventions for such configuration-directories and
> how they work be fruitful? 

Yes, if you already have one; I wouldn't spend too much time, though,
because there are reasons why a good system for one app is not good
for another.  (Emacs vs. Guile, for example.)

> One thing I notice is that systems where performance is important
> seem to "compile" the contents of the config directory into a single
> file which can be read rapidly. [...] The guile analogy might be
> guile-config (a program run by package-post-install scripts)
> collecting %load-path fragments from $prefix/etc/guile-conf.d/* into
> $prefix/share/guile/config.scm (where $prefix is the prefix that
> guile was built with).

Yes, this is pretty much the direction we seem to be moving in now:
see my last post in the "Another load path idea" thread.

> Important details to address:
> - how to control the order in which things appear in %load-path

My inclination is that it is a bug if order is important, but I don't
have much experience to be sure about this yet.  Do you have real
examples where ordering is important?

> - how to make this play well with multiple versions of guile installed
> on the same system.

Can you say more about the problems you have in mind, and how you
think they can be addressed?

>> It seems to me that neither of these ideas (yours and mine) quite fly
>> yet.  I have yet another idea, though, that I'll post in a separate
>> thread shortly.
>
> I'll look for that and keep reading.  Thanks for thinking about this.

Thanks; it's the "Another load path idea" thread.

> My interest in part comes from maintaining a package that uses guile
> and guile-gtk.  It seems that most of my users' problems come when
> they try to install guile-gtk from source (into /usr/local) but have
> guile installed from their linux distribution (in /usr).
> My advice to date is generally to always install guile-gtk and guile
> in the same way: either both from source (say into /usr/local) or to
> build and install both using their package manager.  Or else to become
> wizards at setting up the right environment variables.
> But it would be nice if the more common case would just work.

Yes, this is exactly the kind of case I have in mind as needing
fixing.  (And I have very similar cases with my packages.)

Regards,
        Neil



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