Why I haven't released yet

[Chris Shoemaker]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 01:12:18PM -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:
> 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.

9) Documentation.

-chris