[gambit-list] Proposed changes to makefile targets

Marc Feeley feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Mon Jun 8 11:19:11 EDT 2009


On 6-Jun-09, at 3:50 AM, Adrien Piérard wrote:

> Ha !
> It took me a while, but I finally put 4.4.3 in the FreeBSD ports tree
> (and it made it today).

I hope you will port the next release when it comes out (soon!).   
4.4.3 has a few nasty bugs (such as leaving the terminal in non- 
blocking mode).

>
> Since you are changing makefiles a bit, I would like to a few changes
> with configure too
> configure --interpreter-name=gsi --compiler-name=gsc
> Those defauts would not break anything, and changing them would have
> all the scripts (six, scheme-r4rs, etc) not broken…

I've added these options to the configure script:

   --enable-interpreter-name=INTERP
                           choose name for Gambit interpreter (default  
= gsi)

   --enable-compiler-name=COMP
                           choose name for Gambit compiler (default =  
gsc)

The options --enable-interpreter-name=INTERP and
--enable-compiler-name=COMP are useful when names different from the
defaults are needed (i.e. gsi and gsc respectively).  These options
should be used only when absolutely necessary because users will
expect the defaults (from reading documentation, talking with users on
a different OS, etc).  We strongly suggest that the names start with
gsi and gsc respectively, so that shell tab completion will help the
user discover the correct name.

>
> Also, as far as documentation is concerned, I wish for a little more
> (trivial?) GNUgt portability with rules "pdf", "html", "info" and

The rules pdf, html and info already exist.

> correstponding "install-pdf", "install-html" and "install-info".
> http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/automake/Texinfo.html gives
> pieces of information.

That documentation suggests that the targets install-pdf, install-html  
and install-info are deprecated.  Can you explain why and when these  
are needed?

>
> One more question: now that installation can be properly and easily
> done in several directories, isn't it time for gambit's path-expand to
> have shortcuts to the installation's libs, includes, and so on? Since
> basically gambit modifies only 5 or so paths (bin, include, lib,
> share, doc, info…), perhaps they could be pointed at by some hardcoded
> expansion, or a look at the environment.

This is already implemented!  The syntax is ~~DIR where DIR is lib,  
bin, include, etc.  For example:

% gsi
Gambit v4.4.3

 > (load "~~lib/syntax-case.scm")
"/Users/feeley/my-gambit/lib/syntax-case.scm"

This is documented in the manual (in section 16.1).

>
> Last but not least, when I tried a complete parallel "make -j 4
> install" from scratch, I had errors. I'll copy/paste them here later
> to explicit them, but basically, when entering subdirectories, it had
> a bad precondition (such as "this tool already exists" or something
> like that).


Please submit some details.  And please use Gambit's bugzilla bug  
tracking system (http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/bugzilla/) so  
that the bugs and feature requests can be tracked.

Marc




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