Re: yeRemoving program-arities export

"Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <[email protected]> Wed, 08 Jan 2025 21:21:19 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.lisp.guile.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Skyler Ferris via "Developers list for Guile, the GNU extensibility library" <[email protected]> writes:

> I have 2 concerns that I want to address. The first concern is the bad
> user experience created by calling a procedure which is advertised in
> the manual only to be told that it does not exist. I consider this to
> be an urgent problem and would like to find a path to fix this
> quickly. Based on the above I still believe that removing
> program-arity (and updating the manual accordingly) makes sense.

Given that the program-arity / program-arities is documented, the more
pressing problem is that programs using it would be broken right now.
People may be holding off from updating Guile because they don’t have
the time to investigate breakage in programs that are working perfectly
fine in the old version. Which is the typical case for useful tools.

The worst user experience is seeing a working program break when
updating a dependency: if the docs are wrong, you’re still in the
context of your tool, but if it breaks on update, all that context has
been flushed out already — often years ago.

Is it viable to wrap the procedure and exactly preserve the API, so
existing programs keep working? If it’s a bit slower, that should not
cause pain (because hardware and Guile got faster in the meantime) but
it should not break.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
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heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
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