Re: gnome-terminal macros and guile extensions

[Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow alum mit edu>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 26 Feb 1999, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

> > > This should be in an upcoming version of Guile if I get off my ass enough
> > > to complete the work.
> >
> > Oh, please do it :-)
> >
> 
> Yes! Miguel you've really hit on the right way to do scripting in the "C
> master world" case, with loadable modules - then people can choose the
> scripting language of their choice. Probably --gtk-module is limiting, and
> any complex app should have its own module stubs, but the idea is there.
> And this way users don't have to fool around with scripting or its
> overhead if they don't want it.
> 
> I am already expecting the "is Guile bloat?" flame war for every single
> app, so this is also a politically expedient hack. ;-)

I missed Miguel's original post (maybe they're coming out of order or something)
but that is pretty much the purpose of this enhancement - to allow writing guile
scripting modules for applications that either have no a priori conception of
Guile, such as apache, or ones that want to implement all scripting engines
as dynamic plugins so that users uninterested with scripting need not be
burdened with the overhead. I'm not sure this is the best approach for _all_
cases though - for instance it's not clear to me that the gnome solitaire game
would gain enough benefit from multiple scripting engines to be worth the
bother.

I guess everyone is busy with the release now, but I just made my patch actually 
work earlier today (inspired by the gnome-terminal stuff). If anyone is interested 
in pretesting it and trying it out with plugins for various Gnome programs, please 
email me. Right now I've only tested it on Linux/x86 pre-glibc-2.1 systems (glibc 
2.1 [even the 2.0.10x pre-releases] will cause a significant difference in the 
behavior of the patch) and I'd like to test more widely before posting it in public,
but anyone who wants to play anyway can have it.

A Guile release is vaguely scheduled for sometime in mid-March. I cannot make any
definitive statements about Guile release schedules, but if this target is made
I think my patch will likely be included in that release.

 - Maciej