Re: guile & automake

[Marius Vollmer]

address@hidden (Robert Uhl <address@hidden>) writes:

> Marius Vollmer <address@hidden> writes:
> > 
> > I think it is OK to hardcode pgkdatadir as $(datadir)/guile.  We are
> > not going to change this as far as I can see.
> 
> The problem is that this is not necessarily true.

What I meant was that you would hardcode $(datadir)/guile in your
application instead of using the current GUILE_SITE_DIR.

I would say that it is not in general OK for a package to install
things under a different prefix than it was configured with.  That is
why I agree that the current GUILE_SITE_DIR does not the right thing.
When it uses re-prefix-info, it would do the right thing.  I was
arguing that just hardcoding $(datadir)/guile instead of using a fixed
GUILE_SITE_DIR is OK.  Or fixing GUILE_SITE_DIR to do the hardcoding.
But that would change what GUILE_SITE_DIR does, which might not be
appreciated.

> On my machine, for example, guile is installed in /usr, but a
> third-party package used with guile would go into /usr/local.  I
> suppose that the Best Thing would be simply customise one's
> %load-path

Yes.  When Guile is installed by a distribution into /usr, I'd say it
should have /usr/local/share/guile (etc.) in its search path by
default.

Rob, should we add that to README-PACKAGING?

> It's important to be able to install modules where guile will see
> 'em, and this location will vary from installation to installation.
> There's no straightforward mapping from where guile is installed to
> where the third-party package will be installed.  It's a tricky
> problem, but I think that Thien's solution is the closest to a nice
> solution that we're going to get.

The problem is much larger than what is covered by Thien's solution,
I'm afraid.  The solution does only abstract away that pkgdatadir was
originally $(datadir)/guile.  Its seeming generality might also hurt
since it also affects pkglibdir and pkgincludedir, which are of no
significance (at least in the main line of Guile).

I think the best a package can do is warn when the location where it
is going to install its Scheme modules is not currently in the load
path of Guile, and print instructions on how to fix that.

This could be packaged into a autoconf macro, of course.

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