Wishes to the new G-Wrap maintainer?

[Linas Vepstas]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 02:39:48PM -0400, Derek Atkins was heard to remark:
> Andreas Rottmann <a.rottmann at gmx.at> writes:
> 
> >> #ifdef SWIG
> >> %module mymodule
> >> %{
> >> #include "myname.h"
> >> %}
> >> #endif
> >>
> > This will only work if the header file is simple.

Gnucash header files are simple, intentionally.  This was a design goal.
swig should be able to parse them without any problems.

> have to handle the glib types (gboolean, gint, gint64, etc) and a few
> gnucash structures that are passed by value (e.g. gnc_numeric).

This shouldn't be hard.  My only compaint about swig was that I could
never figure out how to convert GList's to perl lists.  This was
something I really really wanted, since part of teh power of perl is
auto-list-processing.

Coincidentally, what is the 'correct' way of handling typing in scheme?
Say I have a list of accounts, how do I differentiate that from a list
of transactions?  How can I tell teh type of a list element?

> > Sorry, but I disagree here. Modularity is good, 

Up to a point.  Modular design is good.  Itty bitty installable 
packages bite the big one.  Small packages make it hard for the 
package maintainer, make it hard for the distro, and make it hard 
for the app developers, an you get all that difficulty without any
reward, without actually solving any real problems.

> > Users should be using a distribution which provides package management
> > (and not compile packages at all).

Clearly, you've never heard of Gentoo.

> My point is that while modularity is good, tons of tiny little
> packages is not.  C.f. dependency hell.

GnuCash has been living in dependency hell for 5 years, and its ironic,
because this was something that Windows used to suck at.  Now its turned
around, its gotten a lot better on windows, and worse on Linux.  Tiny
little packages suck.

My take on this? g-wrap should probably be a standard part of guile,
or swig, or something, and not a stand-alone package.

--linas

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