I asked Arthur to create this Schemepersist mailing list in the spirit of Schemedoc and Schemeweb, as a place to discuss general issues of persistent storage for Scheme implementations, much of which is already being spread out in various relevant SRFI lists and Schemedoc and Schemeweb. Its remit would include discussion of potential future SRFIs to draft, libraries existing, new, or improved, interface protocols we might want to support, how little we can trust today's software and hardware stacks, etc. etc.

First up for myself is a SRFI to specify a general interface to existing persistence engines, probably relational, at roughly the level of for example Java Database Connectivity (JDBC). It would not attempt any generalizing of SQL language specifics, but might add connection pooling to its remit.

It should for example provide what's needed by John Cowan's in-process SQLite-focused "SRFI to provide a basic relational table capability to Scheme programs": <https://srfi-email.schemers.org/srfi-170/msg/12127109/>. To make it sane and to the point, to be generally useful, it'll need two or more libraries that it can support on top of it.