On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 06:27:17PM -0500, Marc Feeley wrote:
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!
It's more important for the version of BlackHole distributed with Gambit to be compatible with that version of Gambit than it is for it to be up-to-date.
-- hendrik