Guile bug could affect Windows users

["Andreas Köhler"]

Hi,

Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
> >To all Scheme/Guile developers:
> >
> >Although the "dirname" and "basename" procedures are not currently used
> in
> >any GnuCash source code (.scm files), please be aware that these
> procedures
> >do not work properly in Guile 1.6.8 (the version recommended for GnuCash)
> >running on mingw. This affects those of us who have a Windows build
> >environment. If you are writing new Scheme code, I would suggest that
> these
> >procedures be avoided, at least for now.
> >
> >I reported the bug on the Guile mailing list a few days ago, along with a
> >patch to fix it, but haven't heard anything back yet.
> >  
> >
> I am slightly confused here. Please correct which of my assumptions is 
> wrong.
> 
> a) Guile is some sort of LISP dialect.
> b) Two of its "built in" functions are incorrect (ones in the set of 
> predefined functions and/or procedures)
> c) We, more precisely some among us, know what the correct definitions 
> should be.
> 
> Why would this have to wait till THEY (the Guile folks) made a 
> correction to the base system Guile? Could we not publish the correct 
> definitions? It's been a LONG time(many decades) since I did anything 
> with any LISP dialect (and even then just playing/learning; nobody ever 
> paid me to produce LISP programs). But I pretty strongly recall that if 
> anything is defined in an "environment" the evaluation will not use a 
> definition from any surrounding environment  -- in other words, names 
> are not unique and the most local definition is used.
> 
> In other words, were some source code (.scm file) being evaluated 
> incorrectly, prepend to that file the two corrected definitions.

Additionally, when building the setup.exe on Windows we compile guile from
source anyway, so applying a patch that has been sent to bug-guile but is
not contained in any release yet is perfectly fine, at least IMHO.

-- andi5

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