On Wed, 2010-03-24 at 15:34 +0100, Breanndán Ó Nualláin wrote:

I tried to build an up-to-date version of Gambit on Ubuntu 9.10 following the instructions here:

http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Contributing_Patches_to_Gambit_Source_Code

This is the sequence of commands used:

$ cd ~/code/src/
$ wget -c http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/download/gambit/v4.3/source/gambc-v4_3_2-devel.tgz
$ tar zxf gambc-v4_3_2-devel.tgz
$ rm -rf gambit
$ mv gambc-v4_3_2-devel gambit
$ cd gambit
$ ./configure --enable-single-host --enable-gcc-opts --prefix=/usr/local/lib/gambit 
$ make bootstrap
$ make update

Marc has never found it important to be able to use "make update" to update from one release to the next. (I presume that's because he doesn't use "make update" to update from one release to the next.) The "make update" command used above tries to update 4.3.2 to 4.6.0 (the current release), which doesn't work. You can use "make update" to update to changes "within" a release cycle.

It fails at this point while trying to make all in ./lib

The command it fails on is

../gsc-comp -:~~bin=../bin,~~lib=../lib,~~include=../include -f -c -check _io.scm  

The error message is that the usage of the gsc-comp command is incorrect.

It would have been more helpful for you to actually copy the error message to your e-mail.

Brad

On 2010-03-24, at 10:34 AM, Breanndán Ó Nualláin wrote:

I tried to build an up-to-date version of Gambit on Ubuntu 9.10 following the instructions here:

http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Contributing_Patches_t...

This is the sequence of commands used:

$ cd ~/code/src/ $ wget -c http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/download/gambit/v4.3/source/gambc-v4_3_2... $ tar zxf gambc-v4_3_2-devel.tgz $ rm -rf gambit $ mv gambc-v4_3_2-devel gambit $ cd gambit $ ./configure --enable-single-host --enable-gcc-opts --prefix=/usr/local/lib/gambit $ make bootstrap $ make update

It fails at this point while trying to make all in ./lib

The command it fails on is

../gsc-comp -:~~bin=../bin,~~lib=../lib,~~include=../include -f -c -check _io.scm

The error message is that the usage of the gsc-comp command is incorrect.

Any suggestions welcome.

Let me explain the problem. If you're only interested in a solution: get v4.6.0 and a make update from that.

Gambit is a self-hosting compiler. That means that it is bootstrapped using itself. Most of the system is implemented in Scheme (not just the libraries, but the compiler itself). So when a change is made in the compiler's source code, it must be compiled with the current version of the compiler. Roughly speaking, version 2 must be compiled with version 1. Then when changes are made (to get the source code of version 3), then version 3 must be compiled with version 2. And so on. When you "make update" the build process executes the chain of self compilations that led to the most recent version of Gambit. In other words, if the most recent Gambit is v4 and you currently have v1 installed, then the "make update" will: compile the v2 source with the v1 executable to get the v2 executable, then it will compile the v3 source with the v2 executable to get the v3 executable, and finally compile the v4 source with the v3 executable to get the v4 executable. This chain must be followed because features that are used in the source code of the most recent version of the compiler may have appeared (i.e. were implemented) in an intermediate version of the compiler.

This self dependency is not easy to handle in the build process and makefiles, and currently there is a bug. In your particular case, Gambit v4.3.2 does not support the same command line options as more recent version of Gambit. So somewhere in this chain of commits, the makefiles were not consistent with the then current compiler. But because the commits can't be "taken back" the self compilation sequence that "make update" executes has some version transitions that will forever be broken. I haven't looked into ways (automatic tool, or better version changing habits) to avoid this problem in the future.

Marc