Re: how to manage 2 guile version

[Yaakov Selkowitz <yselkowitz at cygwin dot com>]

On 2017-03-28 14:50, Marco Atzeri wrote:
> On 28/03/2017 18:01, Yaakov Selkowitz wrote:
> > On 2017-03-28 02:11, szgyg wrote:
> > > FWIW guile 2.2.0 was released two weeks ago [0]. Mostly works, but it
> > > still has failing tests [1].
> >
> > Oh, great...
> >
> > So we probably should take this into consideration *now*, even though
> > most guile consumers aren't ready for the changes in 2.2 yet.
> >
> > Fortunately, it seems guile itself has taken their own instability into
> > account:
> >
> > https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Parallel-Installations.html
> >
> >
> >
> > Although looking at packages which use guile, most haven't fully adapted
> > to this yet (guile-config is still used by some, and it doesn't seem
> > anyone is using pkg-config to find guile and guild), so we still need to
> > provide unversioned binaries/scripts in /usr/bin for now.
> >
> > It's way too early to make 2.2 "the" guile, so I think we stick with a
> > versioned guile1.8 for the stragglers, and 'guile' being 2.0 for now,
> > but eventually transitioning to a versioned 'guile2.0'.  We'll have to
> > take another look at this once the real world has adapted to 2.2.
>
> Considering some are still straggling on the 1.8 to 2.0 conversion,
> 2.2 is for far future.

Far enough that we need 2.0 right now.

> Do you think we need to maintain 1.8 around ?

Based on Fedora's use of each, of the Cygwin packages currently 
requiring libguile17, at least lilypond and TeXmacs seem not to be 
compatible with 2.0.  There are also a few others in Fedora but not in 
Cygwin (coot, drgeo, gnurobots, trackballs).  So I think it needs to 
stay, at least for now.

> Debian seems to have drop it.

Indeed, although they did so only by bundling guile-1.8 with the 
lilypond source package, attempting to patch some for 2.0 (which doesn't 
always work well), and dropping the rest.  I much prefer Fedora's 
approach of parallel-installing both.

--
Yaakov