Re: working guile-gnome!

[gregory benison]

This seems like an appropriate time to mention what I'm doing with
guile-gnome and how I'm doing it...

I have been working on a new guile-gnome program; it can be thought of
as either a tool for visualizing nuclear magnetic resonance data or as
a tool for drawing purple squiggles that look like Rorschach tests,
whichever works for you.  Many thanks to all who have worked on
guile-gnome and g-wrap (and guile and gtk for that matter) for making
this possible.  A release is available here:

http://oregonstate.edu/~benisong/software/burrow-1.0.tar.gz

Interestingly, as mentioned recently on this list, the
crystallographers have their own guile-gtk program too... structural
biology people seem to understand the advantages of working with
guile.

The tarball above also contains a full tree of g-wrap and guile-gnome,
up to the gtk bindings... invoking 'configure; make; make install' at
the top level builds the whole stack.  Let me explain my reasons for
doing it that way.

A couple of months ago I described a way that guile-gnome can crash
during garbage collection.  As discovered by my second unwitting beta
tester, this issue was causing my program to crash after about twenty
minutes in use, so I had two choices: (1) develop workarounds in my
own code such that it would never trigger the gc-related crash; or (2)
patch guile-gnome itself to remove the crash and distribute this
patched guile-gnome with my own code.  I chose option (2) because it
seemed simpler, because it seemed like something guile-gnome would
want to address in the long term anyway, and because after all, having
that option is supposed to be one of the things that makes free
software so great.

It would be nice to get things back in sync so that I'm using a
standard release of g-wrap and guile-gnome, but this gc issue is
critical for me.  For now, the burrow/g-wrap/guile-gnome combo tarball
seems to get the job done.

Greg

======================
Gregory Benison
Oregon State University
(541)-737-1876
gbenison at gmail dot com
======================