Re: Suggestion: Update-helper for guile users

[Jim Blandy]

> What about the following idea:  We provide a guile application that helps
> to find and potentially update places in user code that should be
> inspected due to changes to the API.  This tool would read a config file,
> that is a scheme representation of that part of NEWS, which may influence
> existing user code.  When called, the tool gets a set of input files that
> are to be checked.

This reminds me of autoscan, the tool that scans your sources and
writes a tentative configure.in file for you.

I think the tool should have a command-line interface similar to grep,
and produce output in the GNU standard error message form:

breakfast.scm:20:4: the function `newtonian-mechanics' is deprecated.
  Guile now requires you do to all physical computations in accord
  with general relativity.  Even simple things, like computing the
  volume of your cereal box, require that you specify an inertial
  frame of reference.
evolution.scm:40: The state of Kansas is now deprecated.

That way, we can just run it from `M-x compile', and everything will work.

I'm not going to help write this, though.  :)