>On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 4:46 PM, Roland Averkamp <roland.averkamp@gmx.de> wrote:

> Is it really necesary to use the Babel and Alexandria libraries in CFFI?
> Now CFFI depends on two libraries and every other system which uses
> CFFI needs these two libraries too.

That's an issue that was taken into consideration.

As a mere user, I was also a bit frustrated trying to compile the newest CFFI with all
its dependencies, especially because these extra packages had RCS's that
were not on my machine. The new CFFI was a long chain of upgrades and installs.
For a newbie, this could be a real roadblock, and each additional step will cause
attrition of the userbase.

Might it be a good idea to repackage these libraries as TRIVIAL-FEATURES-CFFI, BABEL-CFFI, etc,
and distribute these along with cffi? They would still be there, would be easy to upgrade, but
would be invisible to the casual cffi user.

Jan