g-wrap parallel installability part deux

[Andy Wingo]

Yo Andreas,

On Sun, 2004-09-26 at 15:25 +0200, Andreas Rottmann wrote:
> David Pirotte <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > here it is
> >
> This looks a bit like you having installed the old G-Wrap (1.3.4, for
> instance) somewhere in the %load-path, preceding the new G-Wrap

This is going to become a really common case. I just uninstalled gnucash
so that I could install guile-gnome. It's going to suck a lot to say
"Install guile-gnome, but, er, not if you have gnucash..."

Changing gnucash isn't looking exciting -- I don't see them releasing a
fix anytime soon, what with the gtk2 work and all. Seems we're stuck
with the old g-wrap for a while. Any parallel-install situation sounds
exceedingly painful when the modules have the same name. Changing guile-
gnome, etc to use a new g-wrap name sounds really crappy too, prone to
introduce bugs, not to mention changing g-wrap itself.

In light of all of this crappiness, maybe we can kludge again. Include
the old g-wrap in the new g-wrap distro as (g-wrap 1.3.4), and then 
   (module-use! (resolve-interface '(g-wrap))
                (resolve-interface '(g-wrap 1.3.4)))
Since all of the old routines and datatypes have a gw: prefix, they
(ironically) don't conflict with the current g-wrap. We make sure the
latest release of gnucash builds with that setup. Then we link
$(installdir)/g-wrap/$oldfile.scm to $(installdir)/g-
wrap/old/$oldfile.scm.

The only collision will be (g-wrap enumeration), which can be solved by
a similar hack if necessary.

Of course we'll have to detect an existing g-wrap 1.3.4 at configure
time, and error out if we're not overwriting the old installation.

I think it's the route of least pain. What do you think, Andreas? Rob?
If you can get this working within a week or so, I'd wait to release
guile-gnome -- I'd really like to avoid answering this question again ;)

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