Re: Guile Maintainership

[Gary Houston <ghouston at freewire dot co dot uk>]

| I'm now officially the new maintainer of Guile.

Congratulations!

| I think once the immediate needs of documentation and startup time
| are addressed, there are two main areas of work. One is to provide
| a better public face for Guile, and encourage people to contribute
| useful extensions. This can be achieved by providing a repository
| and managed namespace along the lines of CPAN. Jim and I discussed
| this before but unfortunately never had time to work on it.

I'm not really familiar with CPAN.  I agree that it should be easier
to contribute code to Guile, but simply providing a place to dump it
all may not be sufficient.  It makes it hard for somebody to obtain a
reasonably complete installation, since they'd need to download and
install numerous separate packages and deal themselves with any
bitrot.

I wonder if it would be feasible to have two Guile distributions: one
package containing a minimal libguile designed not to scare anybody
looking for an embeddable interpreter, the other a kitchen-sink ala
Emacs or recent gcc versions, including things like hobbit, slib,
scsh, guile-doc, g-wrap, guile-gtk etc.