Guile 2.0.5, HTTP downloads, and progress reports

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

I just realized that users of Guile 2.0.5 are observing weird behavior
when substituting binaries: the substituter would remain silent, write
“the server is unresponsive”, then remain silent some more, and finally
write tens of lines of “progress report” in a row when it’s done
downloading.

This is because 2.0.5’s HTTP client would return directly all of the
downloaded data, instead of returning an input port, making it
impossible to implement a progress report.  (guix http-client) hides
that, hence the behavior above.

I really recommend upgrading Guile anyway, since 2.0.5 is 1.5 year old.

We still want to support it though (because some distros still have
that), but I’m not sure we can do much better.  Well, we could do
better by shipping the (web ...) modules from Guile 2.0.9 when we detect
an old Guile, but that sounds overkill to me.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.