Re: chicken scheme

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello!

John J Foerch <jjfoerch@earthlink.net> skribis:

> I'm finally getting back to this.  One point about chicken is that it
> does not support multiple extension directories, only one.  They go into
> <VARDIR>/chicken/<BINARY-VERSION>.  This introduces a difficulty because
> if VARDIR is /var/lib, then the default extensions (that come with
> chicken) get installed to a global directory.  The chicken-install
> system will then work, but in the future when we add a package importer,
> imported packages would also go into this global directory.
>
> If on the other hand, VARDIR is (string-append out "/var/lib") the
> default extensions and imported extensions go to the right place, but
> manual chicken-install cannot write to that location.
>
> Any further thoughts on this, given that information?

Ouch, that’s a problem.

Nixpkgs uses VARDIR=OUT/var/lib, meaning that chicken-install does not
work.

However, it also contains an optional patch that allows extensions to be
searched for elsewhere:

  https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/development/compilers/chicken/0001-Introduce-CHICKEN_REPOSITORY_EXTRA.patch

I think the best course of action would be to submit this change
upstream, if it hasn’t been done already.  It’s useful beyond Nix and
Guix, so it probably makes sense to include it.

In the meantime, I would (temporarily) sacrifice chicken-install in
favor of an Egg importer.

WDYT?

Thanks,
Ludo’.