I'd vote for having a separate batteries included package (GambitBHL you could call it, for instance, or GaBHLi) for the purpose of a batteries included Gambit/BH.

Any 'batteries included'-purposed set of libraries will be scoped in purpose specifically for exactly that, and will by far not be completely general. BH in itself is much less general purpose than Gambit.

Such a GambitBHL distro could be put together using automated scripts, both for a source and a binary distro. (The script would get latest Gambit, latest BH and the latest b.i.-libs) and be separately downloadable from the Gambit site.


The libs at https://github.com/pereckerdal/blackhole-libs could do as a batteries included-purposed set of libs. I have some updates to it over here that remain to be updated.
     (And, it and the non-syntactictower version of BH, both need the SRFI:s to be split out to a separate srfi package, and within the srfi package some minor adjustments of the naming remain; their names should be numbers 1 13 14 etc. with named variants as mirrors ie list string char etc., at least this came out from my conversation with Per previously.)

Given these updates, all that would be needed after this would be the scripts to put together the complete GambitBHL distro in a source and a binary variant, that mirrors the current set of Gambit binary sets avail online today.


As a side note, Per has made some developments on a package handling mechanism in BH recently, possibly he can tell about it himself.


What are your thoughts on GambitBHL?

Furthermore, if you have any feedback or suggested contributions on the suggested list of included libraries listed above, please let the ml know.

Kind regards, Mikael

2012/1/20 Marc Feeley <feeley@iro.umontreal.ca>

On 2012-01-19, at 5:45 PM, Hendrik Boom wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 06:35:38PM +0300, Mikael wrote:
>> 2011/10/14 Matthew Koichi Grimes <mkg@cs.nyu.edu>
>>
>>> As for Black Hole, one can argue that it should be kept as a separate
>>> package, but there's nothing in that argument that says it can't be included
>>> with the default Gambit installation. I would say the same for the SRFI's
>>> floating around in Snow and Dumping Grounds. I would like for them to be
>>> included by default, and be kept "separable" if that's something the user
>>> cares about.
>>>
>>> Such "batteries inculded" installations are nice because they encourage
>>> exploratory programming by lowering the barrier to trying out new features
>>> (e.g. SRFI's). They also lower the adoption barrier for Gambit as a whole,
>>> by lessening fears that every little thing is going to be some obscure
>>> installation chore. This is particularly important for non-mainstream
>>> languages, which, with some justification, bear the stigma of being a pain
>>> to set up.
>
> Any chance the v4.6.4 prebuilts are batteries-included in this sense?

I'm open to suggestions on how to include Black Hole in the Gambit distribution.  The problem I see is that Black Hole is maintained separately (which is a *good* thing) but it means that the version distributed with Gambit will not be up to date.  Perhaps one way around this is to add a configure switch (--enable-black-hole) to automatically download the latest Black Hole and install it along Gambit.  Perhaps this should be done using Alex Shinn's new Snow package system...  There are so many options!

Marc

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