compan

Community "Package Manager" for Guile

What is compan?

Compan is a tool for automatically fetching Guile modules from remote Mercurial/Git repositories. It provides Guile with the load-modules macro that can be used in the following ways:

;; clone the repository and load (lib) module from the top level:
(load-modules ("https://bitbucket.org/panicz/dogma" (lib)))

;; as above, but load modules from "libraries" directory:
(load-modules (("https://github.com/panicz/pamphlet" "libraries") (pamphlet)))

;; one can also fix on a particular tag/branch/commit:
(load-modules (("https://bitbucket.org/panicz/dogma" "." "3884445191c2") (lib)))

So, in general, the syntax of a single entry in load-modules takes one of the following forms:

((url directory branch) modules ...)
((url directory) modules ...)
(url modules ...)

What the invocation of load-module actually does is that it clones the repository to the ~/.guile.d/compan/ directory (unless already cloned), extends the Guile's load path to be able to load modules from the specified directory, loads the module, and then runs a separate thread to update the repository.

Installation

In order to install Compan, just copy the compan.scm file somewhere to your Guile load path, and run (use-modules (compan)) from within Guile.

Note that you need to have Mercurial installed for the Compan to work. If you want to be able to fetch Git repositories, you'll need to install Hg-Git extension to Mercurial.