[gnutls-dev] Integrating Guile bindings?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org> writes:

> Hi!  I don't have a strong opinion.  I believe that if guile-gnutls
> would ever cause a ./configure && make of GnuTLS itself to fail, I'd be
> rather inclined to disable it, though.  However, good configure.ac code
> would be able to disable the build if it cannot be installed, and not
> cause any problems.

Right.

> I'm somewhat concerned about the size of the GnuTLS distribution
> archive, and would rather want to modularize things (i.e., remove the
> libtasn1 + opencdk copies) than include even more stuff.  But I'm not
> sure this is really a valid concern.  It is still small compared to
> OpenOffice...

FWIW, the GnuTLS 1.6.2 tar.gz is around 4200 KB and the Guile-GnuTLS
tar.gz is less than 460 KB.

> Another concern is build-time.  Building GnuTLS from a fresh CVS is what
> I often do to test things, and even today that is slower than I would
> like.  (I'm not on slow hardware!)  Would I have to build the guile
> stuff in order to do 'make dist'?  If there are any files in the
> *.tar.gz which is generated during build in the guile/ directory,
> guile-gnutls would need to be built as well.

In principle, nothing needs to be built in Guile-GnuTLS for "make dist"
(it has to be configured, though).  However, when starting from a fresh
checkout, there are a few `BUILT_SOURCES' that must be built to produce
the Info file.  That should be pretty fast, though.

> Perhaps others could chime in... It would be interesting to know what
> various GNU/Linux distributors think about this.

I know that D-BUS and Avahi come with Python and Java/C# bindings
(included in the main distribution), GNU Mailutils contains Guile
bindings.

Besides, there's a host of C libraries whose bindings for other
languages are maintained separately, e.g., GTK+ (GTK+ has "official"
bindings though [0], meaning that they are guaranteed to be up-to-date
wrt. the C API).

I don't know what packagers prefer.  Having bindings in the main
distribution may give them a strong incentive to actually package them.
;-)

Thanks,
Ludovic.

[0] http://gtk.org/bindings.html