To recap: I've chosen a project, made a list of the component technologies (the GNU C compiler, the GNU C library, Guile, project GNU's extension language, the GNU m4 macro processor, GNU Autoconf, GNU Make, the GNU New Curses library, GNU libtool, Texinfo, the GNU documentation system, and the Concurrent Versioning System), read all their manuals, brushed up on the GNU coding standards and philosophy, and started coding on the system I had lying around. The system I had available was Cygwin running on my Windows XP box.
Then, as I began hacking, I started to see that starting line move further and further back.
First, the NCurses binding for Guile didn't really work for me, and it wasn't as complete as I'd hoped.
So I tried to wrap the NCurses quickly using G-Wrap, but, version 1.9.9 doesn't build on Cygwin.
So, I wrapped it all myself with a bit of GNU Awk craziness. It looked pretty good, so I though I was ready to build my library and test it.
This lead to the problem of making dl-openable libraries on Cygwin. Being a Microsoft platform, dl-openable libraries are DLLs. Making a DLL on Cygwin with Libtool and Autoconf is complicated and doesn't work as expected. I found a good reference to do it raw, sans Libtool, but, I wanted Libtool to work for me. I'm still looking for the perfect documentation on Libtool on Cygwin.
Whilst trying to get my Guile module to load a DLL, I got one of the greatest error messages I've ever seen from Guile.
ERROR: no error.
So, screw Cygwin. I started to move to are the platforms onto which this is supposed to be compilable. The coding standard suggests that GNU/Linux and GNU (Hurd) are the minimum set. Okay. I have Slackware 12.0 CDs. Installing that was easy enough, sort of. Networking still not working.
Then I moved onto the Hurd install. Utter crapflood of installation badness.
No matter. I am stubborn. I can work it all out.
Look for the alpha to be ready early in the 2020s. ;-)