[Swig-devel] New modules discussion

[William S F. <ws...@fu...>]

Over the last month or so, there have been patches for 3 new SWIG
modules, R, occam-pi and Squirrel. This email is for discussing adding
these 3 modules and new modules in general.

It is great to have new modules and over time, new languages have been
regularly added to SWIG, see http://www.swig.org/compat.html. I just 
counted 19 language modules in total. Many of the major languages are
now covered. There are dozens if not hundreds of lesser known languages 
for which SWIG modules could be created. The above 3 fall into the 
lesser known category, and I'm a bit concerned that SWIG will become 
bloatware with lots of unmaintained code for obscure languages and 
become a maintenance hassle. A few language modules have already started 
to bitrot or never got off the ground once they were committed. Could 
the other main SWIG developers comment about the following suggestions 
to keep this under control.

Currently there are some prerequisites at 
http://www.swig.org/Doc1.3/Extending.html#Extending_prerequisites to be 
met for getting a new language into the main SWIG distribution. Can we 
tighten this further? ...

For any language to be accepted into the SWIG distribution, it should 
pass at least 80% of the test-suite. If it drops below this figure it 
will be removed from the main distribution. This is to encourage 
maintainers to maintain the module. No single person has all the 
languages installed on their machines and testing is currently a tedious 
process so if the maintainer cannot show that the test-suite is working 
well enough at each release, the module will also be removed. That is 
unless someone wants to step forward and maintain a test system for all 
languages for everyone to see.

In this regard, can the 3 patch submitters post the results of the 
test-suite for their respective languages with a count of tests passed. 
Incidentally, getting the majority of the test-suite to pass isn't that 
onerous once the basics are in place.

William