Dan McMahill <dmcmahill@NetBSD.org> writes:

> Greg Troxel wrote:
>>   1)  import lang/guile16 which is guile-1.6.x installed in
>>   ${LOCALBASE}/guile/1.6/ like how lang/guile14 is done now.
>>
>>   2)  blindly point all the packages which currently use guile to
>>   lang/guile16 and bump their PKGREVISIONS.
>>
>>   3)  update lang/guile to 1.8.1.
>>
>>   4)  ask maintainers of the packages touched in #2 to migrate back to
>>   lang/guile where possible.
>
>> Does your guile 1.8.1 package work with slib?  If it does, it might be
>> better (given limited cycles) to skip step (2) of your plan and then
>> point whatever fails back at guile16.  This breaks the build of some
>> packages briefly but gets us forward faster.  guile 1.8 has been out for
>> a long time, so an upstream package that doesn't work with it is crufty.
>
> how do I see if guile-1.8.1 works with slib?

$ guile
guile> (use-modules (ice-9 slib))
guile> (require 'pretty-print)
guile> (pretty-print '((a b) (b c d) e))
((a b) (b c d) e)
18

You'll need the guile-slib package.  It works fine with 1.6.8.   In
1.6.8, see ice-9/slib.scm and slib-old.scm.   I suspect that something
like what's in slib.scm (minus the option to use slib-old.scm, and minus
the browse-url stuff) will be adequate.

> While we're at at, do you know how to run the guile test suite from
> within the debugger?  I noticed that both guile-1.6.8 (from
> lang/guile) and guile-1.8.1 (not yet committed) segfault on a few of
> the tests on NetBSD-2/alpha.

No, I don't.  If the problems are similar in 1.6.8 and 1.8.1 I'd suggest
deferring worrying about that until after the upgrade, as it seems very
likely to be an upstream bug that isn't getting worse.