Is the recompilation of the Debian package with support libraries possib le ?

[Emmanuel Charpentier]

Dear list,

after a 37 years (!) hiatus, I have the opportunity to come back to
APL. Gnu apl appears to be the easiest way to do that, at least
partially due to emacs' gnu-apl-mode package, which appears to be a
great interface.

However, I wondered why the Debian package distributed by Gnu comes
without support for libapl.so and lib_gnu_apl.so libraries,which would
allow to use APL from other interface.

An obvious use case would be the creation of a gnu APL kernel for
Jupyter : I tried Dyalog's interpreter and its Jupyter notebook kernel,
and appreciated the result, but Dyalog's software is not free (even
when it's gratis).

Another use case would be a minimal ob-apl package allowing the
inclusion of APL code and results in an org document, a form of writing
I use more and more...

Both of these use cases could be covered by a "clever" use of expect
(or pexpect, in Python's case), but interfacing with libraries would
probably be much easier.

Furthermore, keeping a *packaged* version of APL makes its maintenance
much easier.

So I'm looking for hints and advice on how to recompile and repackage
APL for Debian(-like) systems with libraries support (I am aware that
this possibly could result in the creation of distinct packages, at
least for lib_gnu_apl.so : libapl.so could be part of the main apl
package, where the binary apl could be a user front end calling it for
computation).

Secondary question : it appears that this part of Ubuntu, but not of
Debian. Do you know why ?

BTW : I'm not (yet) on the list, so I would appreciate a Cc:
emm.charpentier@free.fr of your (eagerly awaited) replies.

Sincerely,

--
Emmanuel Charpentier