2011/10/14 Matthew Koichi Grimes
<mkg@cs.nyu.edu>
> The latter one could with benefit be switched from odt as source format to html; you are the first one who asks for this.
For what it's worth, let me be the second who asks for this :) PDF docs are unpopular because they take a while to load, they usually aren't well hyperlinked, and individual pages can't be bookmarked in the browser.
Very well, I intend to sort this one out in some while.
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.
What about for separate download some kind of bundle distribution, Gambit + module system + libraries package, maybe even with an autoinstaller.
There's even space to be more such package variants, anyone can just put one together and make it available really.
(Re putting module system and libraries into the default Gambit distribution, I believe you want to keep them separate as they're fundamentally different things. Consider this comparison of programming environments - Gambit as GCC, module system/B.H. as automake and bundled libraries as - uh - Boost.)
Brgds
Mikael
-- Matt