Re: [Chicken-users] [Chicken-hackers] Some questions about CHICKEN 5 eggs and modules

[Ivan Raikov]

Hi  Felix,

I think this last question about installing include files is closely
related to my question, so let me try to clarify.

I have a couple of eggs that generate and compile code similar to the
way chicken-crunch works. These eggs would install header or source
files that are required for the compilation process. Some of these
source files belong to distinct functional modules that are organized
in subdirectories. In CHICKEN 4, it was possible to install these
files to corresponding subdirectories of CHICKEN_PREFIX/share/chicken,
thus preserving the logical structure. In CHICKEN 5, this is currently
not possible, but I think it would be a very convenient feature. We
can of course define our own conventions and install the additional
files into subdirectories of $HOME, but it makes more sense to me to
keep them in the CHICKEN directory hierarchy. I hope this makes sense.

Best regards,
-Ivan

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:40 AM <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> <snip>
> > - Is there a clean way to install C and Scheme include files somewhere else
> > than the default place from an .egg file? It seems to be possible to specify
> > absolute target paths, but that is pretty much useless since the prefix of 
> > the
> > CHICKEN installation is not known at the time the .egg file is written. 
> > Also,
> > specifying relative *source* paths for include files doesn't even work, if 
> > they
> > have subdirectory components, because the files get installed in the top 
> > level
> > target directories but their full relative paths get entered into the 
> > .egg-info
> > files. An equivalent to custom build scripts doesn't seem to exist for file
> > deployment either.
>
> Installation into system paths seems to me somewhat questionable -
> files installed for CHICKEN should end in a location specific to that
> CHICKEN installation. If you can give a specific example where this
> is useful, I'd appreciate it.
>
> A final note: don't expect too much of chicken-install: it is neither a
> package system, nor it is a general build system. It addresses the basic
> need of installing Scheme libraries. These may use foreign code and
> we will try to work on supporting the most common cases.
> But not all scenarios can be convered, as you will surely understand,
> the different OS- and toolchain-idiosynchrasies are already making
> this a serious piece of work. If you have very specialized build- and/or
> usage-cases, consider distributing the code not as an egg but as a
> normal library using whatever build system you prefer.