Re: How to make GNU Guile more successful

[Panicz Maciej Godek]

2017-03-10 15:27 GMT+01:00 <address@hidden>:


> That's very cool :) And also supports my point that there should be
> something
> like a wiki for publishing information about Guile packages. It'd be hard
> for me to find this on my own.
>
> [...]
>>
>
> Yeah, for one I don't think the URLs should go directly into the code, but
> rather in a package metadata file. The reason is I don't think we should
> hard-code the package manager in the code. People should be able to use
> the code without having the package manager, if they already have the
> dependencies installed by some other means. But the basic idea is cool. :)
>

There is a reason why I like the idea of having URLs directly in the code,
namely that it makes you independent from some big institutions/particular
maintainers. Of course it is risky if your code refers to repositories that
you do not control, but you can always make your private forks.

Essentially the power of this idea is that it suddenly turns the whole web
into a Guile Incomprehensive Archive Network (clearly, a word beginning
with a letter T is missing to get a nice acronym).

Of course, it should be very easy to build a translation layer that
would map package names to addresses, but it requires a middleman
which always makes the costs higher (but perhaps having a proxy that
would make the necessary forks automatically would be a nice idea.
Plus if it would be able to check whether the changes between
some commits break compatibility then, well, that would really be
something. Which brings to mind the recent talk by Rich Hickey:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk )

I do agree that something wiki-like would be a lovely thing.