Re: Trouble with circular module dependencies (Re: 01/02: gnu: Add ncurses-with-gpm.)

[Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org>]

Hi Mark,

On Sun, 23 Jul 2017 18:22:39 -0400
Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> wrote:

> any of us could make, invited by our IMO questionable practice of
> allowing cyclic module dependencies, and not sufficiently mitigated by
> warnings about this issue.

Sorry!

It was actually caused by me trying to avoid a dependency of (gnu packages ncurses) to (gnu packages linux).  But in trying to avoid it I made it worse.

I have to say this circular dependency stuff is quite... strange.  I'm not sure what it helps to have it in Guile at all.

But thanks for the explanation.  I've also looked at libguile/modules.c where it indeed first creates an empty module and only then resolves the imports (scm_c_define_module).

I've worked with languages which explicitly disallow module circular dependencies (Pascal etc) and it's not been constraining to me - on the contrary, it makes me better visualize which modules are more fundamental (in my reductionist worldview of a program).