Some opinions on whether there be a guile20 port?

[Ken Cunningham]

guile moved to 2.2.2 a few months ago, and at least two ports that link against guile 2.0.18 broke when 2.2 rolled out:

geda-gaf <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/54293> and autogen <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/54112>.  

An outside patch <http://savannah.gnu.org/support/?109347>  will let autogen build against most guile versions, including 2.0.18 and 2.2.2. I have that commit ready to go <https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/778>. The other broken port(s)  can no doubt be patched too.


the author of autogen has not verified autogen against guile 2.2, and doesn't (yet) indicate an interest in doing so <http://mac-os-forge.2317878.n4.nabble.com/autogen-install-or-upgrade-fails-td336506.html> .

almost all the autogen tests unfortunately fail, whether built against guile 2.0.18 or guile 2.2.2, which seems to be due to some kind of messed up linkage against gettext that after a couple of hours of plugging away I was not able to fix. So the tests are useless at present.

Some users <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/54112#comment:6> have indicated a strong interest in having the "validated" guile 2.0 stay around as guile20 for the long term, or at least until autogen is validated against guile 2.2. Others <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/54112#comment:8> don't seem so worried.

Having them as conflicting either-or ports would be simple. Making them coexist is more of a project, and no doubt would cause pkg-config confusion. 


SO - guile20? or patch ports (unvalidated as they might be) and move ahead with guile 2.2.2?



As a PS, guile 2.2.2 longer builds on older machines ( <10.7). I can fix 10.6 easily, but the PPC machines are stuck at 2.0.18, quite possibly forever.