Re: Testing for a GUILE installation

[David Allouche]

Well... first, thank all for all those replies. I have some problems
caching up with my late email since I went back from summer vacation,
so sorry for the late reply.


On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 11:18:51AM -0700, Thien-Thi Nguyen wrote:
>    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:
>
[snip]
>
> 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.

Well... my question was about detecting the presence of GUILE at
run-time. Joris (the TeXmacs author) is very fond of distributing
binaries... he believes that helps widen the public of the program.

Nevertheless, thanks for your detailed info on autoconfiguration.


On Fri, Oct 11, 2002 at 10:37:24PM +0100, Neil Jerram wrote:
> >>>>> "David" == David Allouche <address@hidden> writes:
>
>     David> I worked around the current bug in guile-config, by using
>     David> 'guile --version' and doing a different parsing of the
>     David> result. But I would like to know if there is a recommended,
>     David> less hackish, way of testing that GUILE is correctly
>     David> installed.
>
> What do you mean by correctly installed?
>
> If there is a specific set of testable features that matter to you,
> you could write a Guile script that tries to use those features, and
> arrange to run `guile -s testscript.scm' as part of ./configure.

Well... I think that is the right question. I guess the point of that
code is producing a (somewhat) helpful error message when libguile was
linked within TeXmacs, but the relevant support files are not present
on the host system.

That is not about testing the presence on any specific feature, but
just testing at run-time for the presence of the guile stuff...


On Tue, Oct 15, 2002 at 12:34:50AM +0200, Marius Vollmer wrote:
> David Allouche <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > Also, for TeXmacs to work with guile-1.6.0 I have to avoid prepending
> > the "$datadir/guile/$version" to GUILE_LOAD_PATH, otherwise I get an
> > error:
> >
> >     ERROR: Unbound variable: include-deprecated-features
> >
> > Leaving GUILE_LOAD_PATH alone seems to work okay also with guile-1.4.
> > But then I wonder what was the use of that code...
>
> Which code to you refer to?  Is it in TeXmacs or in Guile?  I don't
> understand why you try to find the default load-path of Guile.  If you
> want to know where to install your Scheme files that Guile should be
> able to find by default, just use "$datadir/guile/".

Really, I do not know what that was supposed to do. I naively supposed
that code was NOT another of Joris eccentricities and that you guile
gurus could tell me something like "oh yes, that was needed on some
martian installation of guile-beta-3"...


> Otherwise, you might be able to use
>
>     $ guile -c "(display (cadr %load-path))"
>
> But that is a bit hackish as well.

That is not the point... TeXmacs apparently only set the
GUILE_LOAD_PATH for use by libguile. That is not used anywhere else.


I think I am just going to let this stuff be. I have plenty of more
useful things to annoy Joris with, so I'd rather not waste our time
with this particular bit of (seemingly harmless) cruft.

Thanks all for your support. I'll be back next time I have a problem
with GUILE, and will first ask the boss what his damn code is supposed
to do. :-)

Cheers.

-- 
David Allouche         | GNU TeXmacs -- Writing is a pleasure
Free software engineer |    http://www.texmacs.org
   http://ddaa.net     |    http://alqua.com/tmresources
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TeXmacs is NOT a LaTeX front-end and is unrelated to emacs.