Bundling G-Wrap

[Andreas Rottmann]

linas at linas.org (Linas Vepstas) writes:

> On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 04:22:59PM +0200, Andreas Rottmann was heard to remark:
>> 
>> [ CC'ing g-wrap-dev, guile-gtk-general. The discussion is about that
>>   since G-Wrap now comes without GLib bindings, the GnuCash folks have a
>>   dependency more, which they seem utterly opposed to ]
>
> No, don't misunderstand/misquote on purpose.  You know what this is about.
>
Sorry, but this is about what I understood.

>
>> > My take on this? g-wrap should probably be a standard part of guile,
>> > or swig, or something, and not a stand-alone package.
>
> The complaint was about the proliferation of package dependencies
> and the linux version of the old microsoft 'dll hell'.  Any given
> day of the week, the mailing lists are dominated by discussion of
> people who cannot successfully build/install gnucash.  That is just
> plain wrong.  People should be talking about something else, and not
> the difficulty of install.
>
ACK.

> The problem is the proliferation of packages that are poorly maintained
> and don't have properly defined pkg-config or automake macros or
> whatever, or are growing oldy/moldy/rancid due to lack of maintainer
> activity.
>
> I beleive that the problem could be solved by merging smaller packages
> into bigger ones, where maintainers could share the work of upkeep.
>
>> - bundling it with Guile: would mean _way_ too slow releases
>
> Which is HIGHLY PREFERABLE to NO RELEASES which is what g-wrap has had
> for 3-4 years now.
>
Indeed, but I plan to do active development and releases on
G-Wrap. Please note that I'm responsible for G-Wrap jsut for a short
time now.

>  G-Wrap is broken, busted and no one is maintaining
> it, and it basically just sucks because of this, and it is the 
> leading #1 poster child for everything that can possibly go wrong
> with an independent package release.  
>
I'm willing to change this.

> I'd like to avoid re-living all of the mistakes of the past; the 
> problem of packaging being the biggest.
>
> (Surely you don't want to hear how 1.3.4 is incompatible with 1.3.1?
>
Well, I mostly care about the rewritten G-Wrap (1.9.x series). Since
that isn't a drop-in replacement for 1.3.4, 

> or that the package is (was?) identified as "g-warp" on debian ... 
>
Currently, we have:

% apt-cache search g-wrap
libgwrapguile-dev - Development package for libgwrapguile1
libgwrapguile1 - g-wrap: Tool for exporting C libraries into Scheme interpreters

Packages of g-wrap 1.9.0 are in preparation (I'll take over Debian
maintainership, too), the main package of which will be named g-wrap
(suprise, surprise).

> a clever naming twist that makes it impossible to find, or the guile
> warnings that it currently spews?)
>
Well, a 1.4.0 release is in the line, which will fix these.

Andy
-- 
Andreas Rottmann         | Rotty at ICQ      | 118634484 at ICQ | a.rottmann at gmx.at
http://yi.org/rotty      | GnuPG Key: http://yi.org/rotty/gpg.asc
Fingerprint              | DFB4 4EB4 78A4 5EEE 6219  F228 F92F CFC5 01FD 5B62

Latein ist das humanoide Äquivalent zu Fortran.
   -- Alexander Bartolich in at.linux