scheme-only code

[Andy Wingo]

Hey folks,

I've been thinking a bit about scheme-only code in guile-gnome. It makes
sense that if someone develops code based on guile-gnome that is of
general utility, that the code be available for others to use. Some
things that I have written that fall into this category include:

  * code that that renders texinfo into a GtkTextBuffer
  * a help browser built around that
  * a custom gtktreemodel that holds its data as a list, but only
    exposes elements that satisfy a custom predicate that can be
    dynamically set at runtime: useful for filtering, typeahead 
    selection of a subset of elements, etc.
  * a custom gtktreemodel that only calculates its data as it is
    accessed
  * a source code editor (with undo/redo, cut/copy/paste, etc)
  * a repl window

The condition of the code varies, though. I would count some to be
stable, and some to be of decidedly beta quality. Which is to say, some
of it's useful, but not worth supporting.

Towards this end, I propose to create a (gnome contrib) module prefix
for code that doesn't wrap an upstream module. Modules in this category
will be stable throughout the period that guile-gnome is stable
(although it is permitted to add API). The code should be included in
the arch category corresponding to the top of its dependency stack.

There is also a need for a way to package code that is strictly
experimental, but that intends to become stable at some point --
something like libegg. For the moment, I'm going to put code of this
nature in the examples/ directory, although I do that that for
prototyping purposes, this code should be installed as a module
somewhere. Perhaps somewhere where you have to explicitly set a guile
load path for it to work.

Dunno, I'm just throwing this out there. Thoughts are welcome. The
texinfo buffer[0] is already in my tree (and possibly in guile-gnome by
now) as (gnome contrib texinfo-buffer), although it could be moved at
some point.

[0] Relies on my (sxml texinfo ...) modules, which given the recent
guile-user discussions should probably be renamed to (texinfo ...).

Peace,
-- 
Andy Wingo <address@hidden>
http://ambient.2y.net/wingo/