Guile 2 compatible release tarballs

[John Ralls]

On May 27, 2013, at 1:45 PM, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:

> Let me bring guile 2 up again. The current status is this:
> - gnucash is ready for guile2, but depends on a very recent version of swig to generate guile 2 
> compatible wrapper code
> - in fact *very* recent: swig 2.0.10 has been release today and is the first version of swig 
> capable of generating guile 2 compatible wrapper code
> 
> Does that mean we *require* swig 2.0.10 ? No. GnuCash 2.5.x works perfectly fine with guile 
> 1.8 and older versions of swig generate code that works fine with guile 1.8.
> 
> So if you start from our svn/git repository, it's just a matter of personal choice: do I want guile 
> 2 ? Ok, I'll have to make sure I get swig 2.0.10. If that's not an option yet, stick with guile 1.8 
> and an older version of swig. Working code will be generated in both cases.
> 
> But what about our tarballs ? There we currently have a problem. The tarballs are shipped 
> with pre-generated wrapper code. So a consumer of our tarballs doesn't have the choice: it 
> has to find a guile version compatible with the pre-generated wrapper code. The currently 
> pre-generated wrapper code is not guile 2 compatible, because it's still generated with an 
> older swig version.
> 
> This mostly affects distro packagers. Most distros are currently switching to guile 2. Since our 
> tarballs are not guile 2 ready, distros still have to provide guile 1.8 as well.
> 
> Also it sends the wrong message: we claim gnucash is guile 2 ready, but we ship a tarball 
> that doesn't work with guile 2 ? Not good.
> 
> So here's my request: can we do future 2.5.x releases on a machine that has swig 2.0.10 
> installed ? I know it's incredibly recent software, but it would correct the message we send 
> and make the lives of several distro packagers more easy.
> 
> With "future", I don't mean 2.5.2 that's currently in the middle of a release, but perhaps 2.5.3 
> end of June would be possible ?
> 
> There is one more devil in the details: while the tarballs for 2.5.x should ideally be generated 
> on a system with swig 2.0.10, tarballs for any possible future 2.4.x releases should *not*. 
> Reason: swig 2.0.10 drops support for guile 1.6, while we claim gnucash 2.4.x does support 
> guile 1.6.
> 
> So either 2.4.x and 2.5.x releases should be done from different machines or we drop support 
> for guile 1.6 as well in the next 2.4.x release (if any).
> 
> What do you think ?
> 
> @John: since you are currently doing most releases, the question is probably aimed mostly at 
> you: are you willing to install swig 2.0.10 on a machine you will be generating tarballs on ?

Yup. No problem. It's just a VM, and it's used exclusively for cross-platform
testing and doing Gnucash releases. Building now...

Regards,
John Ralls