Guile bug could affect Windows users

Charles Day cedayiv at gmail.com
Thu Jan 24 19:44:31 EST 2008


On Jan 23, 2008 12:31 PM, Charles Day <cedayiv at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Jan 23, 2008 6:25 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
>
> > Quoting Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com>:
> >
> > >
> > >>
> > >> 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
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > > Again I am probably making some wrong assumptions. Compiling WHAT? The
> > > interpreter certainly, "eval" itself, perhaps a few of the most
> > > basic/most frequently used function definitions. But with most
> > > "extendable" languages like LISP and its dialects the bulk of the
> > > definitions available at the start are usually done in the language
> > > itself. OR, in "compile and go" implementations that makes little
> > > difference (any that are added are compiled before
> > execution/evaluation
> > > as opposed to a strict "interpreter" implementation where the
> > expression
> > > would be reinterpreted every time used.)
> > >
> > > Isn't that true of Guile? Some reason to believe that these particular
> > > erroneous definitions were part of the compile? Even if they were,
> > what
> > > difference would that make except perhaps speed when being evaluated?
> > > They still could be overridden by redefinition, yes?
> > >
> > > (I hope not confusing people with bringing up matters of how LISP like
> > > languages are implemented..)
> >
> > I think what he meant is that we start with the guild source tree
> > and create our own guile environment from source.  In other words, we
> > control the guile environment on windows so we can apply this patch.
> > Whereas on other platforms we assume the OS/Distro provides guile
> > to us and we just use it.
> >
>
> The bug is in the Guile source code, in libguile/filesys.c.  In truth, I
> made the (perhaps incorrect) assumption that the GnuCash project would not
> want to maintain custom fixes to Guile. If that's an option, a more detailed
> description of the bug, along with my very simple patch can be found here<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guile/2008-01/msg00041.html>
> .
>
> But as I said, this bug is not really a big deal at the moment because
> GnuCash isn't actually using the dirname or basename procedures. (I grep'd
> all the .scm files and found no matches.)  So I just wanted to warn anyone
> who might decide to begin using these procedures.
>

I just received word that the Guile folks have approved my patch and will
include it in Guile 1.6.9 when it is released.


> -Charles
>
>
>
> >
> > -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
> >
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> >
>
>


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