Hi Marc,
I am still trying to maintain gambit in FreeBSD, and they have updated their ports system, ie the way third-party software is built and installed on the OS. Their new system, called "staging", consists in compiling and installing the software in place in the ports tree, and then in moving all the files to the root of the file system.
Roughly, you're in /usr/ports/language/gambit-c, you build and install, getting /usr/ports/language/gambit-c/stage/usr/bin/gsi /usr/ports/language/gambit-c/stage/usr/bin/gsc ...
and finally, FreeBSD moves everything to its right place, eg,
/usr/bin/gsi /usr/bin/gsc ...
The problem is that before moving things around, the ports system checks for the string "/usr/ports/language/gambit-c" and finds a few in binaries. It then refuses to install (most likely because it would break the installation).
So, my questions are - why do we apparently have hard-coded strings? - what can we do to get rid of them and improve portability of gambit?
If we don't fix this problem by June 31st, gambit will be removed automatically from FreeBSD's ports.
Cheers,
P!