Re: Guile support in GNU make

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Paul Smith <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:47:00 -0500
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> What I was talking about above was going even further than that:
> avoiding even install-time dependencies!  This is only possible if we
> create a "load" command as in my other message.

You mean, user-level (i.e. Makefile-level) command?  I don't think
this is necessarily the only solution.  We could instead load Guile on
demand, when some of its features are first used, using dlopen and
dlsym.

We could also have a user-level function to probe for Guile
availability, so that Makefile's could be written to fail gracefully,
or fall back to an alternative method, if it isn't.

That would give us true "no install-time dependencies" feature wrt
Guile.

On second thought, perhaps a function to probe for Guile availability
is a good idea even if we don't support load on demand.