Re: [Chicken-janitors] #1171: combinatorics: the trick to conditionally include setup-helper-cock doesn't work

[Chicken Trac]

#1171: combinatorics: the trick to conditionally include setup-helper-cock 
doesn't
work
-------------------------+--------------------------------------------------
  Reporter:  mario       |       Owner:  klutometis   
      Type:  defect      |      Status:  closed       
  Priority:  major       |   Milestone:  someday      
 Component:  extensions  |     Version:  4.9.x        
Resolution:  fixed       |    Keywords:  combinatorics
-------------------------+--------------------------------------------------

Comment(by mario):

 This issue is a bit tricky. As far as I understand, setup-helper-cock does
 the same as setup-helper used to do: it "manually" copies a file to
 chicken-home, which is in CHICKEN's include path.  That approach is not
 ideal, for at least these reasons:

   1. since setup-helper-cock.scm is not installed by install-extension,
 there's no trace about its installation anywhere, so chicken-uninstall
 does not remove it if you run "chicken-uninstall setup-helper-cock"

   2. when installing eggs into a private repository (like salmonella
 does), CHICKEN's core tools do not create a private chicken-home. So,
 chicken-home is kinda global.  That means salmonella cannot simply remove
 it.  So, once files are installed into chicken-home, they will permanently
 pollute the test environment.  The current code in salmonella's master
 branch (https://github.com/mario-goulart/salmonella) does the best it can
 at the moment: it prints a big warning about the existence of Scheme files
 in chicken-home, which can affect tests.

 Thus, there's not much salmonella can do about it. Arguably, the fact the
 chicken-home is in the include path is a CHICKEN issue.

 With regard to the actual issue with combinatorics, it probably works on
 your system because you do have setup-helper-cock installed.  If you don't
 specify setup-helper-cock in .meta's dependencies forms, combinatorics'
 installation will fail badly in case the user doesn't have setup-helper-
 cock installed (we had a hard time debugging a similar issue related to
 kvlists a couple of weeks ago). The real fix would be adding setup-helper-
 cock to combinatorics' dependencies form.

 With regard to setup-helper-cock, a better approach would be '''not'''
 installing files in chicken-home, for the reasons mentioned above. AFAIK,
 the problematic approach has been deprecated by setup-helper.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://bugs.call-cc.org/ticket/1171#comment:2>
CHICKEN Scheme <http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/>
CHICKEN Scheme is a compiler for the Scheme programming language.