Re: [Swig-devel] Guile support ?

[Geert J. <in...@ko...>]

Op 18-01-13 22:56, William S Fulton schreef:
> On 18/01/13 20:55, Geert Janssens wrote:
>> On 05-01-13 02:42, William S Fulton wrote:
>> > On 21/12/12 17:27, Geert Janssens wrote:
>> >> Hi,
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> So I'm wondering if guile is still officially or unofficially 
>> supported
>> >> by swig ?
>> >>
>> >> Note that meanwhile I have added a pointer in the bug tracker item 
>> to a
>> >> patch I propose to fix the guile 2 issues in swig, while maintaining
>> >> backwards compatibility with both guile 1.6 and 1.8. I'm not sure if
>> >> this is the preferred way to propose patches. Any feedback would be
>> >> greatly appreciated.
>> >>
>> > I've stopped testing Guile when making releases because it has bit
>> > rotted and no-one has stepped forward to help out. If you are familiar
>> > with Guile, which it sounds like you are, then you are welcome to take
>> > over as maintainer of the language module in as small or large a
>> > capacity as you like. I don't have time to look at all the language
>> > modules like Guile, but if whatever changes you make don't regress the
>> > test-suite for guile 1.6 and 1.8 and improves 2.0, then you can push
>> > them into the next SWIG release.
>> >
>> > William
>> Well, I'm not fluent in Guile, but I know enough to fix things here and
>> there.
>>
> That's about all that is required.
>
>> I am willing to volunteer as a (co-)maintainer for Guile, since it's
>> currently important for the GnuCash project to get it more up to date.
>> My time is limited though, so the amount I can contribute can vary.
>>
> Well, that's great, I don't think much is going to improve with Guile 
> otherwise.
>
I have been looking at the test suite of failures for guile. What 
follows is an impression of my findings so far.

The good news is that the patch I proposed for guile 2 doesn't regress 
the tests for guile 1.8.

I can't check for guile 1.6  because I don't have access to a guile 1.6 
system. And to be honest I don't want to spend my time on 1.6. That 
version has been abandoned by the guile developers since the release of 
guile 2.0 so I'd rather focus on the actively supported versions.

The "bad" news is that so far running the test suite with guile 2 gives 
a lot of errors. It's my impression that guile 2 has a slightly 
different way of looking for shared libraries. I'll have to investigate 
further.

Additionally, I note that the guilescm test suite is in much better 
shape than the guile test suite. The former uses Guile's scm api, while 
the latter uses the gh api. With guile 1.8 the gh api has been 
deprecated. In guile 2 it has been completely removed. Again, like 
support for guile 1.6, I have no intention to revive the gh api test 
suite. Given its future, I perceive this as a waste of time.

Looking into the details of the test suites for both api's, it turns out 
that the guilescm test suite is actually heavily dependent on the guile 
test suite. The difference is only in one config parameter and some 
tweaks to load scripts from a different directory. Since gh is 
deprecated, it would make more sense to me that the test suite in guile 
uses the scm api and that the gh tests are run from a dependent guilegh 
directory. That way the directories would reflect the preference of api 
better. It would also be easier to fully drop support for guilegh at 
some point. Only the guilegh directory would have to be removed.
Are you ok with me rearranging this directory structure ? Obviously I 
will have to take care not to regress the suites while doing so.

Geert