Re: GNU Guile 2.9.2 Released [beta]

David Pirotte <[email protected]> Tue, 28 May 2019 01:35:00 -0300
Newsgroups	gmane.lisp.guile.devel,gmane.lisp.guile.sources
Message-ID	<20190528013500.2f024786@capac>
Hello Andy,
Ludovic and Mark,

> We are pleased to announce GNU Guile release 2.9.2.  This is the second
> pre-release of what will eventually become the 3.0 release series.
> ...

Thanks for the the fantastic work and and congrat for the release.

I'd like to insist upon the importance, imo, and I believe in the opinion of those
of us who do work daily manipulating (very) large structures (lists, vectors ...),
like Daniel [1], to have the default repl and raised exception printers to use
truncated-print (or what ever procedure), together with a very simple 'mechanism' to
set it to 'full line printing' on demand [2]:

	excerpt from [1]:

	"... I depend on the patch myself to be able to use Guile..."

	So do I - thanks Daniel - and so does any of us that has to manipulate
	large to very large structure ...

Having to have to update/change (ice-9 boot) to be able to merely use large
structures in Guile is quite a 'bad sign', even for us, but for end-users, it is a
blocker: not even Guix accepted to patch Guile this way, why would any lambda
end-user accept that they have to do that? In my experience, they don't [3]:

	while talking to 'bavier' - a long time ago, time runs ... - the guix
	contributor who offered to package Guile-CV, I mentioned that Guile should be
	patched as well, otherwise Guile-CV would be unusable, then Rekado said he
	would not accept to do that ... (I am not blaming him, just saying that if
	even one of the Guix maintainer is 'scared' to patch (ice-9 boot) using a patch
	written by someone who has commit right for Guile ...)

I wish I could recommend any one to install and use Guile-CV, even to those who do
not know scheme (yet) - and I wish it'd be packaged n Guix: this problem is not the
only reason this did not happen yet, but it is the major one [4].

I hope this email, and those it refers to, will grab your attentions to this - 'not so
important for you' but fundamental for us and our users - 'problem' (it is a real
problem for us and our users).

3.0 is an excellent time to 'fix it', imo.

Thanks,
David

[1]	https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg14648.html

[2]	to be used 'when needed', either punctually, in a repl, or in .guile for
	those who prefer this default or even in $prefix/share/guile/site/init.scm
	for those who	prefer/need a global config - but the default should be
	to use truncate both for the repl and the raise exception 'system'.

[3]	in order to be able to 'just' use Guile-CV, here is what a user has to do 

	https://www.gnu.org/software/guile-cv/manual/html_node/Configuring-Guile_0027s-raised-exception-system.html#Configuring-Guile_0027s-raised-exception-system

[4]	the other reason for Guile-CV not being in Guix yet is being that it uses
	latex to produce histograms, needs a few latex packages, but in Guix,
	Texlive is a huge package and Guix contributors would prefer to split Texlive
	first ... iiuc
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