RFS: mosh

[David Banks <amoebae@gmail.com>]

Dear mentors,

[Please read long description under this template]

* Package name    : mosh
  Version         : 0.2.7-1
  Upstream Author : Taro Minowa <higepon@users.sourceforge.jp>
* URL             : http://code.google.com/p/mosh-scheme/
* License         : BSD-2-clause
  Section         : lisp

It builds these binary packages:
mosh       - fast R6RS Scheme interpreter
mosh-doc   - reference documentation for Mosh

The package appears to be lintian clean.  Pedantic shows a few warnings
about duplicated files in the docs package - this is not a problem in my
opinion, as the files are small autogenerated index entries and
semantically meaningful in their own right.  I have overridden
unusual-interpreter.

The upload would fix these bugs: 631139, 537776 (archived)

My motivation for maintaining this package is: I use this interpreter
and have submitted several patches upstream.

The package can be found on mentors.debian.net:
- URL: http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/m/mosh
- Source repository: deb-src http://mentors.debian.net/debian unstable
main contrib non-free
- dget http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/m/mosh/mosh_0.2.7-1.dsc


Before you review it, let me point out several issues that may interest
you. This is a rather tough package, for two main reasons:

#1.  It requires an embedded copy of the Boehm GC.  dmoerner previously
attempted to unbundle this and it did work, however a recent change in
Mosh relies on a non-default compile time configuration of the GC, and
also bugfixes which are only present in the CVS version.  As such it's
quite impractical to unbundle the GC library at the moment, and the
upstream bug is marked WONTFIX.  See:
http://code.google.com/p/mosh-scheme/issues/detail?id=156

For reference, I have attempted to build against a libgc using a default
configuration and it breaks badly at runtime.

#2.  psyntax-mosh requires several Scheme sources to be compiled into a
single 'binary' (which is actually text, but not human-editable).
However, the build script requires a previous version of Mosh.  Releases
are distributed with a precompiled version so the users doesn't need an
older version.  I asked about this on IRC, and it seems it's
unacceptable to use the precompiled file in the final build, so two
solutions were suggested.  One is to initially build using the
precompiled file and then rebuild over the top using the
now-bootstrapped version (The version doesn't necessarily need to be
older.)  The other method is to split the source package into two
packages, mosh-bootstrap and mosh, where mosh-bootstrap is
arch-independent and mosh arch-dependent.  Neither of these are clean
but that is probably unavoidable.

As a result of this I am not immediately expecting a sponsor (though
hope springs eternal), but rather looking for comments and some advice
on how to proceed.

Cheers,
-- 
David Banks  <amoebae@gmail.com>