Re: [ANN] Guile Hall Release (v0.1.1)

[Alex Sassmannshausen <alex.sassmannshausen@gmail.com>]

Hi Ludo,

Ludovic Courtès writes:

> Hello Alex,
>
> Alex Sassmannshausen <alex.sassmannshausen@gmail.com> skribis:
>
>> Otherwise you can get the code from
>> https://gitlab.com/a-sassmannshausen/guile-hall/, and build (hopefully)
>> using the traditional
>> $ autoreconf -vif && ./configure && make
>> dance.
>>
>> What is Guile Hall?
>>
>> From the README:
>>
>> Hall is a command-line application and a set of Guile libraries that
>> allow you to quickly create and publish Guile projects.  It allows you
>> to transparently support the GNU build system, manage a project
>> hierarchy & provides tight coupling to Guix.
>
> This looks really great!  There’s this longstanding issue with
> distributing Guile code, and this seems to be a good approach.
>
> In particular, that it’s not a Guix-only solution, while at the same
> time offering Guix support is really a wise choice.

Thanks for your kind and thoughtful notes :-)

> I think we should advertise it widely, it’ll be immensely helpful to
> newcomers.  When the manual is more complete ;-), we could refer to it
> from guile.texi, too.

That would be wonderful — I'm particularly interested in hearing from
relative newcomers as to the user journey and/or ease of use!

I anticipate I'll be adding a manual for the next release or so, but I
want to see how the project performs in my own world, and in public for
a while first.  It may need some re-architecturing! 

> I wonder if it would be useful to have a “standalone” mode, where Hall
> would rely neither on Autoconf/Automake nor on Guix to do basic things
> like building code.  It might help newcomers.  You wouldn’t want to
> reimplement everything though, so I don’t know if this is a viable
> approach.  Thoughts?

Interesting idea.  When you say building code, do you mean literally
compiling a project within the project folder & perhaps generating a
wrapper script that might update GUILE_LOAD_{COMPILED_}PATH à la
pre-inst-env, or do you mean some form of installer?

My thinking guiding the project so far is that I think Guix is the
de-facto Guile package manager, and as such I want to encourage an easy
user-journey for people towards using/contributing to it.  But if we can
offer a fully stand-alone "run your self-contained Guile project with no
dependencies" workflow, which offers a user journey to autotools/guix
distribution without the user having to do any additional work, then
that might certainly be interesting!

> Thank you!
>
> Ludo’.

Thank you for your comments!

Alex