[gambit-list] Autoconf

Andrew Lentvorski bsder at allcaps.org
Fri Mar 14 17:05:07 EDT 2008


Joel J. Adamson wrote:
> Dear Gambitizers,
> 
> Does anyone use Autoconf?  One of the supposed advantages of compiling
> Scheme->C is that the C is portable and therefore "compilable" by anyone
> with a C compiler.  
> 
> Autoconf seems to be the most familiar routine (I mean typing
> ./configure && make && make install), so it would be good to know how to
> set up such a distribution.  For example, "make dist" would compile
> scheme modules in such a way that all the work left is for the C
> compiler.
> 
> I realize this raises some questions about linking with Gambit, so I'm a
> little confused.
> 
> Does anyone have a schema for using Autoconf that I could see?

I don't recommend using autoconf.  It's especially bad when you need to 
do cross-compiling where the original build environment differs from the 
environment that you want to deploy into.

In addition, you can just *forget* Windows.

I really recommend scons.  It has almost as much magic as autoconf, and 
it's a *lot* friendlier.  It also handles Windows as well as 
cross-compiling much better.

The downside, of course, is that it requires Python if you are going to 
build from scratch.

-a




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