Re: Testing for a GUILE installation

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

   From: David Allouche <address@hidden>
   Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 15:02:32 +0200

   recommended, less hackish, way of
   testing that GUILE is correctly installed.

use GUILE_PROGS macro in configure.in.  call aclocal in your autogen.sh
script (or equivalent).  this adds a check for guile and guile-config to
be run at configure-time.  see guile.m4 for other checks:

## GUILE_PROGS -- set paths to Guile interpreter, config and tool programs
## GUILE_FLAGS -- set flags for compiling and linking with Guile
## GUILE_SITE_DIR -- find path to Guile "site" directory
## GUILE_CHECK -- evaluate Guile Scheme code and capture the return value
## GUILE_MODULE_CHECK -- check feature of a Guile Scheme module
## GUILE_MODULE_AVAILABLE -- check availability of a Guile Scheme module
## GUILE_MODULE_REQUIRED -- fail if a Guile Scheme module is unavailable
## GUILE_MODULE_EXPORTS -- check if a module exports a variable
## GUILE_MODULE_REQUIRED_EXPORT -- fail if a module doesn't export a variable

for automated generation of some of these macro "calls", create
top-level file modules.af w/ contents:

  (files-glob "scheme/*.scm" "etc/*.scm")     ; munge paths to taste

add in autogen.sh:

  guile-tools autofrisk

and modify the aclocal call to include cwd:

  aclocal -I .

this adds checks for those modules referenced in scheme/*.scm and
etc/*.scm to be run at configure-time.  look at autofrisk commentary for
ways to fine-tune these checks.  here are some examples:

  http://www.glug.org/people/ttn/software/etrack/dist/0.86/modules.af
  http://www.glug.org/people/ttn/software/ttn-pers-scheme/dist/0.31/modules.af

see also autogen.sh files in the same directories.

lastly, in general you should not check for program version number as an
indirect indicator of some feature; check for the feature specifically.

thi