Re: Reconsideration of MinGW work

[Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>]

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Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org> writes:

> One nagging concern I've got about my Guile-Emacs project is the
> seemingly narrow focus of active Guile developers as far as platforms
> are concerned.  I'm one of, what, two or three people testing the
> development versions on Mac OS X now and then, and most of the rest of
> the work is on x86 or x86-64 GNU/Linux systems, it seems?  But Emacs
> works on a lot more systems (including MinGW, for people who don't
> want all of Cygwin), and saying "hey, we can change Emacs to be
> Guile-based on x86 GNU/Linux systems; too bad about all the other
> platforms" wouldn't go over terribly well.

I test on NetBSD, and in theory care about not only i386 and amd64 but
also sparc64.  But I have not had a lot of spare time lately to hack on
guile.  I am running autobuilds on list.ir.bbn.com (NetBSD amd64):

  http://autobuild.josefsson.org/guile/

and it looked like some non-portable assumptions have crept in:

  http://autobuild.josefsson.org/guile/log-201003220603936147000.txt

> For a random Scheme implementation, it's okay to pick the set of
> platforms you want to support, and drop whatever's inconvenient.  But
> if you want to be the official extension language for the GNU project,
> used by (theoretically) lots of GNU packages, you've got to support
> all the platforms the developers of those platforms want to support,
> if you possibly can.  I think that includes both Cygwin and MinGW, and
> probably not just supporting whatever subset can be mapped into POSIX
> functions via Gnulib.  We can probably punt on VMS, though....

The target set definitely ought to include cygwin, but the GNU project
has a bias for Free and/or POSIX operating systems so I am willing to
forgo getting upset about lack of mingw support.  But surely we should
be happy if someone provides it.


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