Re: gEDA-dev: guile-1.8 requirement

[Stuart Brorson <sdb-at-NOSPAMcloud9_dot_net>]

>> Somebody (I won't mention any names, but I know who you are!) modified
>> libgeda's configure.ac to require guile-1.8.
> [snip]
>
> Yes, I have been in contact with said individual and let him do this.
> I really would like to push forward with guile-1.8.

Oh.  That's fine, but let's consider the implications....

... and the biggest is this business of guile-1.8 requiring GNU GMP.
That makes the CD installer problematic, since it can't install guile
(a gEDA dependency) in many cases because guile itself is missing
dependencies.

> [snip]
>> Or, if you let me know what the desired functionality is, I can try to
>> hack together a guile replacement myself at the code sprint.  I'd like
>> to leave the guile requirement back at 1.6 for at least a year or two,
>> until most systems out there come with guile-1.8 pre-installed.
>
> guile 1.6.7 (.8 was a bug fix) has been out for 3 years already.
> 1.8.x has been out for a year.

The big-picture question is:  Which Linux distros do we want to
support?  Is SuSE 9.3 too old?  SuSE 10.x?  How about FC2, 3, 4,
5.....   If we define a few distros which are "supported", and declare
older ones "unsupported", then we can see which use guile-1.6 and
which use guile-1.8.

> It comes down to three scm_* functions: scm_from_locale_string, scm_is_true
> and scm_is_false.  There are also a ton of deprecated guile functions that
> I would like to scrape.
>
> However, I'm willing to be a little flexible if there are 1.6.x
> alternatives to these three functions.

That's fine.  But first, perhaps we can have a discussion about which
Linux distros we want to support.

IMO, we'd arbitrarily say that the cut-off line for supported distros
is 3 years old.  From the user perspective, that's basically two
generations of computer equipment ago (18 months is the age-span of
computer equipment).  And I'd bet that lots of gEDA users are on
machines approaching (or over) 3 years old.

Sound reasonable?  Or do you have a different preference?

Stuart


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