Why I haven't released yet

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting Ludovic Courtès <ludovic.courtes at laas.fr>:

> Hi,
>
> Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> writes:
>
>> For what it's worth, GnuCash SVN/trunk doesn't use g-wrap anymore.  We
>> changed over to using SWIG.  So once we release 2.2 g-wrap can just be
>> left to die ;)
>
> Out of curiosity: could you summarize the reasons why you decided to
> switch?

1) g-wrap wasn't being maintained; there hasn't been a release for a long
   time, the release is broken (e.g. it doesn't find glib2 properly),
   and nobody was responding to any email about issues.
2) g-wrap is hard to build.  It doesn't work on many platforms (e.g. I
   still can't get 1.9.6 to build, let alone work, on Solaris because
   of libffi).
3) g-wrap is guile-only; swig allows us to theoretically make bindings
   for many other languages, like perl or python.
4) g-wrap is extremely fragile, and lots of users have problems because
   e.g. g-wrap got split into too many packages and there's not a good way
   to make sure all the proper packages are installed
5) swig allows us to build the wrappers during 'make dist' so someone building
   the package from the tarball doesn't require any build-time (OR Runtime)
   libraries, so it reduces our dependencies on users.
6) swig is much better supported, has a larger user community, and is
   much more responsive to issues.
7) swig s used by MANY more applications
8) I'm sure I can come up with more, and I'm sure that Chris or others could
   add their $0.02 to the mix.

> Thanks,
> Ludovic.

You're welcome...

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available