[RFC] Moving to Guile 2.2 and away from GUB

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

Hi all,

with the landing of !1009, the "new" scripts for building binaries are
now complete, or at least ready to be used and where I planed to take
them for the beginning. For the next step, I'd like to propose that we
release 2.23.5 relatively soon (as Phil has time) using GUB, including
the cross-compiled binaries distributed so far. In addition, I can take
the official source tar (produced by GUB) and build binaries for Linux,
macOS, and Windows which we can test and compare to those from GUB. As
a reminder, the executables will be 64-bit and using Guile 2.2, meaning
no memory woes on Windows and finally working on recent versions of
macOS 🙂

Assuming no major problems are found, we could then move completely to
Guile 2.2 and do releases without GUB. Both steps still require a bit
of work; I'm relatively sure there is still a GC related issue causing
(very rare) crashes with Guile 2.2 and we need the infrastructure to
build the documentation without GUB (but I know in principle how I
think we should do this, building on the containers we use for CI).

Now, doing two major switches like this at once is certainly not ideal,
and I'd prefer otherwise, but I'm currently convinced that it's not
possible to disentangle them because
a) if we move to Guile 2.2 first, we'd need to teach GUB how to build
it, or
b) otherwise support Guile 1.8 in the "new" scripts, which is not
possible either because it doesn't work on 64-bit mingw (and it
generally cannot be built fully statically, which is annoying).

So this process might not be as smooth as other transitions that I've
proposed in the past, but I think it's the best and only way to move
forward.

What do you think?

Jonas

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