Re: Guile-Config 0.1 Released

[Barry Fishman <barry@ecubist.org>]

On 2016-02-17 08:43:43 +0100, Alex Sassmannshausen wrote:
> Arne Babenhauserheide writes:
>> Is there a recommended way to use this in my project when my users don’t
>> use Guix?
>
> You should be able to do the usual GNU installation procedure of:
> - download tarball
> - untar
> - run ./configure && make && make install
>
> You may need to install some additional build tools for this, but
> outside build tools the only dependency should be guile.
>
> HTH, let me know if you run into problems with that :-)

Is there a public repository for this software?

The configure fails on any guile 2.1. Part of the problem seems to be
that configure script does not like to put stuff under 2.2 but just 2.0.

After installing in 2.0.11, I found that the Texinfo file had:

@dircategory Guile
@direntry
* Guile Config: (Config).       Declarative program configuration
@end direntry

but the info file is not Config or Config.info, but conf.info.

As a general side note, not specific to this modules:

it seems unnecessarily hard to install packages using the current
configure environment.  This is in spite of the fact that when one
installs a packages there must already have a working guile present,
which presumably knows more about its install environment that a lot of
sed/m4/bash/whatever twisty code.

Unlike most other high level environments, Guile seem to insist on using
this junk which makes distributing the code far more complex that the
writing it in the first place.

Then with each Guile update, one seems to need to start over,
considering how many guile modules fail to pass their tests, usually
having nothing to do with the code itself.  Currently the popular
failure involves trying to:

(primitive-load "/bin/sh")

for some inexplicable reason.

Personally I just use GNU make and some:

sitedir = $(shell guile-config sitedir)

style assignments.

Having a standard configure environment based on Guile producing generic
Makefiles would be useful.  Even after the current style configure
completes the resulting Makefiles seem to be far more complicated than
necessary for a guile module.

It seems that a general GNU configure environment based on Guile is
becoming increasingly remote as Guile moves from a simple to build
extension language to a complex multi-language environment, too far down
the build dependency chain to use.

--
Barry Fishman