Re: [Chicken-users] Re: Q: Installing extensions & Source code

[Felix Winkelmann]

Ed Watkeys wrote:
> On Sep 12, 2004, at 12:00 PM, Johannes Groedem wrote:
>
> > By the way, chicken-setup can download eggs for you (as of some recent
> > version), provided they're available from the Chicken homepage:
> >
> >  $ chicken-setup loop
> >
> >  The extension loop does not exists.
> >  Do you want to download it ? (yes/no) [yes]
>
>
> I know that, but I'm not sure how I learned it. Does anyone have any 
> interest in checking out the eggs documentation with an eye toward 
> making it more useful to someone who has never used Chicken before?

From http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/eggs/index.html:

Installation:
Just enter

$ chicken-setup EXTENSIONNAME

This will download anything needed and compile and install the library. If your extension repository is placed at a 
location for which you don't have write permissions, then run chicken-setup as root. You can obtain the repository 
location by running chicken-setup -repository .

If you only want to download the extension and install it later, pass the 
-fetch option to chicken-setup :

$ chicken-setup -fetch EXTENSIONNAME

By default the archive will be unpacked into a temporary directory (named EXTENSIONNAME.egg.dir ) and the directory will 
be removed if the installation completed successfully. To keep the extracted files add -keep to the options passed to 
chicken-setup .

For more information, enter

$ chicken-setup -help

(But I agree that this should perhaps be linked more "visible" from the main 
page)


> On a related note, the library documentation should really put a higher 
> value on the contents of an extension than the SRFI it implements. And 
> finding information on text formatting or basic IO is a pain to someone 
> not fully indoctrinated in the Scheme religion because you don't know 
> where to look. Is it a unit? Is it a built-in function? And some stuff 
> doesn't seem to appear in the index, and of course the index is most 
> useful when you know the name of a function that you're looking for.

Yes, that's right. It's kind of a goose hunt finding where exactly a particular
definition is hidden.
If there's anything missing in the index, please tell me, and I will try
to fix this (as far as me texinfo skills allow).

> The Python online library documentation works pretty well in the 
> respect: They have a big, detailed table of contents that lists library 
> names and descriptions of what they are for, allowing me to browse or do 
> a text search on the page. The Python library docs fall down when you 
> want to know the syntax to "print", because it's a keyword, not a 
> function, and you need to look in two or three places to find a 
> satisfactory explanation of how to specify a file object destination.

You mean some kind of general cross-reference? Good idea.


cheers,
felix