Re: Emacs and Guile

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() Miles Bader <address@hidden>
() Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:43:23 +0900

   What does "fails to find a sanctioned path" mean?

One tries to get from point A (working code on 1.8) to point B
(same code working on both 1.8 and 2.0), by modifying the code.
There are many ways to change.  What's the best, for some set of
criteria (elegance, maintainability, minimal disturbance to the
force, ...)?  If one can attain neither the best nor the middling
way, but must resort to the worst, i.e., top-level:

  (cond ((version=? "1.8") ORIGINAL-WORKING-CODE)
        ((version=? "2.0") COMPLETELY-DIFFERENT-CODE)
        (else (error "NOT YET IMPLEMENTED")))

then, yes, that is a path, valid and functional, but no, it is not
sanctionable because ORIGINAL-WORKING-CODE was merely set aside and
now must compete for attention w/ COMPLETELY-DIFFERENT-CODE.  You
might as well have taken the advice "use another implementation /
language / platform / licensing model".  You might as well have
operated w/o awareness of GNU or its ideals in the first place.

Luckily (IMHO), such a situation only occurs when features are
completely dropped, which is rare to start and increasingly rare as
the Guile hackers learn to heed their users' needs.

Unluckily, not everyone who follows Guile development can take the
travails of the Lilypond transition (in which critical features
were discovered to have gone missing in Guile 2.0 and required to
be added back, after much exhausting "discussion") so sanguinely.
That's why Someone should put energy into mending what was rent.

Anyway, this is no longer about Emacs, so i'll shut up now.