Gash --- Guile As SHell
***********************

Gash is a POSIX-compatible shell written in Guile Scheme.  It provides
both the shell interface, as well as a Guile library for parsing shell
scripts.  Gash is designed to bootstrap Bash as part of the Guix
bootstrap process.  We are planning to develop Gash into a
general-purpose shell and tool for building interfaces between Scheme
and the shell.

It is still early days for Gash.  At the moment, Gash is extremely
limited and extremely slow, so we cannot recommend using it as your
shell.  It does its bootstrapping job, and the parser works well for
POSIX-compatible scripts, but that's about it.

Installing
==========

This package uses GNU Autotools for building and installing.  For
details on how to configure, build, and install it, see the file named
'INSTALLING'.

If you have GNU Guix, you can skip all that and install the package
by running:

     guix package -f guix.scm

Gash is designed to work with Guile versions as early as 2.0.9.

Normally, you should build Gash using 'configure' and 'make'.
However, it can be built with nothing but Guile.  There is an example
of this in the file 'tests/bootstrap/bash-without-bash.scm'.

Testing
=======

Gash includes a number of unit and integration tests that can be run
using 'make check'.  If you are using Guile 2.0.9, you will have to
make SRFI 64 available to run the unit tests.  To do this, you can
copy 'module/srfi/srfi-64.scm' and the 'module/srfi/srfi-64' directory
from a newer version of Guile into a directory named 'srfi' in the
Gash source code directory.

If you have GNU Guix, you can also run the following extra tests.

The bootstrap test can be run using 'make check-bootstrap'.  It builds
Gash using nothing but Guix's bootstrap Guile, then uses Gash to build
Bash using Guix's bootstrap toolchain.  This test is designed to make
sure that Gash is suitable for bootstrapping.

The specification tests can be run using 'make check-spec'.  These
tests get copied and adapted from Oil <https://www.oilshell.org/>, and
then run against Gash.

Copying
=======

Gash is free software released under the GNU GPLv3 (or later).  See
'COPYING' for the full license.  Enjoy!