On Tue, Aug 16, 2022 at 9:59 AM Maxime Devos <maximede...@telenet.be> wrote:
> > On 16-08-2022 18:10, Aleix Conchillo Flaqué wrote: > > Hi, > > In many projects I've been copying Göran Weinholt's base64 implementation > and I've also seen it in other projects, would it make sense to include it > in Guile's standard library? [...] > > If we do this, we should contact the various other projects to make them > use (ice-9 base64). > > I think they could switch whenever they want (i.e. whenever this was added to Guile) or even not switch at all. > I think it would be simpler though to consider the base64 in guile-gcrypt > to be 'canonical', it would avoid problems with old versions of Guile not > having the base64 module and newer version having it, which would prevent > using the proposed (ice-9 base64) in Guile because it would break > build-aux/build-self.scm when pulling or time-machining from old Guix that > have an old Guile. > > I've been waiting on a guile-gcrypt release for a while now (Ludo, Chrisitine... any help here? :-) ). I ported guile-jwt to use guile-gcrypt but I need a release to have latest base64 changes: https://notabug.org/cwebber/guile-gcrypt/commit/f8934ec94df5868ee8baf1fb0f8ed0f24e7e91eb But you are right that this would cause a backward compatible problem, but I guess that would depend on each project. Can we do conditional module loading? I've done this in the past with Python... if we are in Python 2 load this module, otherwise load this other one. So projects could do that. > Whether we simply replace (guix base64) by (gcrypt base64) depends on how > old (gcrypt base64) is compared to the earliest 'supported' Guix for > pull/time-travel, but even if it is not present in the old gcrypt, we can > work-around that (we have a 'fake-gcrypt-hash' in build-aux/build-self.scm, > so we can easily have a (define gcrypt-base64 [some copy])). Or simply > update the local guile-gcrypt in buid-aux/build-self.scm. > > guile-gcrypt base64 is pretty new with the patch above (but no release after that), I have no idea if Guix has added anything else. > OTOH a similar replacement can be done for (ice-9 base64), but > transitioning to (ice-9 base64) would take much longer, at least until the > various distributions are updated to a Guile that has (ice-9 base64), > whereas (gcrypt base64) could be switched to immediately. > > > Maybe this could be handled by each project independently. Best, Aleix
