Re: guile & automake

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

   From: address@hidden (Robert Uhl <address@hidden>)
   Date: 01 Sep 2002 08:41:46 -0600

   Yeah, there's that too.  It's a somewhat tricky problem, I think.  On
   the one hand, guile wants all code in a convenient spot.  OTOH,
   admins may have a real reason to install guile in /usr, another
   package in /usr/local and still another in /opt/$(PACKAGE).

sounds like the best approach is to allow the site admin to set a
configuration option and the third party package author to find its
value in some standard way.  GUILE_SITE_DIR is the latter, so all we
need to do to complete the circle is add the former.

see guile-1.4.1.83 for that (NEWS excerpt follows), under:

  http://www.glug.org/tmp/2002-09/

the revised guile.m4 news entry mentions scheme_site_dir, also.  w/
these changes, guile maintenance loses a policy decision burden; thanks
for pointing out this opportunity for slack!

(gentle reminder: hardcoding things usually reduces slack.)

thi

___________________________________________________________
* New configure option: --enable-site-dir=DIR

Normally, configuration sets scheme_site_dir to be ${datadir}/guile/site,
but you can select another directory to use instead.  The site directory
is available to C code as SCM_SITE_DIR, and to Scheme code as:

  (assq-ref %guile-build-info 'scheme_site_dir)     ; note underscores

It is available to third party programs via the GUILE_SITE_DIR configure.ac
macro, which sets var GUILE_SITE and does AC_SUBST on it.

* guile.m4 changes

The GUILE_SITE_DIR macro now uses "guile-config re-prefix-info" so that
it is amenable to "configure --prefix", useful in "make distcheck", for
example.  The variable consulted is `scheme_site_dir'.

Note that the guile.m4 file is now distributed in subdir am/ although it
is still installed in the same place.

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