Re: SRFI-59, SLIB, and SCHEME_LIBRARY_PATH Vitaly Magerya 10 Oct 2009 09:41 UTC

Derick Eddington wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-10-08 at 12:42 +0300, Vitaly Magerya wrote:
>> Abdulaziz Ghuloum wrote:
>>> The whole idea of using "SCHEME_LIBRARY_PATH" is to say where your
>>> Scheme files are.
>>
>> SCHEME_LIBRARY_PATH in this SRFI only specifies where R6RS libraries
>> are. If R^NRS libraries (for some N>  6) will not be compatible, you'll
>> end up with the same kind of conflict.
>
> This SRFI intends to be usable by any dialect with library names being a
> sequence of symbols.  That is why, in the Abstract, I wrote: "intended
> for implementations of the R6RS, and perhaps other Scheme dialects".  Do
> you think that should be made clearer?  I'm thinking I should add
> something like the first sentence of this paragraph to somewhere in this
> SRFI's document.

The mapping of libraries to a file hierarchy described by this SRFI is
quite generic, and will work with all dialects where normalized library
names are symbol lists (sans versioning).

What will not work is putting files from conflicting dialects in the
same place (SCHEME_LIBRARY_SEARCH_PATHS in current draft).

So if this SRFI is to be language-agnostic, it should specify how
libraries from different dialects (e.g. R^NRS, SLIB) are to co-exist in
a single location. If not then a single dialect should be chosen
and SCHEME_LIBRARY_SEARCH_PATHS renamed to reflect that choice.
Alternatively this whole part can be dropped.