Re: [Texmacs-dev] Disastrous boot time for new versions

[Joris van der Hoeven]

> Not to be a party-pooper or anything, however, I would like to remind
> you that Guile is widely available in most popular distributions due to
> the fact that, IIRC, it is used by GNOME (sawfish , et. al.).  Also,
> TeXmacs is available in a convenient RPM form, which plugs right in with
> most major distributions.
> 
> Many people who use TeXmacs are not necessarily Unix hackers.  They just
> want to double-click on the RPM and get to work on their papers, rather
> than having to hack around (where even ./configure ; make ; make
> install; can be considered "hacking around" - although to a much smaller
> extent).

I agree and our RPM's are shipped with a statically linked guile library
for this reason. So the problem only arises when compiling TeXmacs yourself.

> If TeXmacs ends up depending on a Scheme implementation other than
> Guile, it will lose the automatic Guile support of major distributors. 
> Consequently, I recommend that a link be placed on the texmacs.org Web
> site right next to the link pointing to the TeXmacs rpm, a link to a RPM
> package containing whatever Scheme implementation TeXmacs will end up
> using, so that all those non-hackers with very little time on their
> hands can simply double-click not 1, but 2 RPMs and continue to be on
> their way through newer versions of TeXmacs.
> 
> Realize that this means that the Scheme implementation in question /must
> have/ an RPM version of itself - even .src.rpm would be OK.  Otherwise,
> I would have to say that it would be necessary for /somebody/ at
> texmacs.org to maintain an RPM version of the Scheme implementation
> TeXmacs will end up depending on.  Of course, this could be done in
> co-operation with the maintainers of the Scheme implementation, which
> would benefit both communities, but that's an issue to be addressed
> later.
> 
> Consequently, I believe that
> 
> cd ~/some-scheme-distro ; ./configure ; make ; make install
> cd ../TeXmacs-current-src ; ./configure ; make ; make install
> 
> should be the absolute worst-case-scenario any user should have to go
> through.

I agree and, ideally, the

        cd ~/some-scheme-distro ; ./configure ; make ; make install

should not be necessary. If we find a really good and small scheme
implementation, we may also consider shipping it direct with
the TeXmacs sources.

After thinking a bit more on these issues, I now reached the conclusion
that we might want to be compatible with several scheme implementations,
just as Maxima works for different lisp implementations. Since the Glue
code is well localized now, this should be an achieveable goal.