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

[Felix Winkelmann]

Ed Watkeys wrote:
> On Sep 13, 2004, at 4:13 AM, Felix Winkelmann wrote:
>
> > 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:
>
>
> Okay, okay: I'm officially a moron. :) This is an area that is a problem 
> because Chicken is actually simpler than Perl or Python. With those two 
> languages, you need to download something manually and un-tgz it. 
> There's almost always an INSTALL file that says, "perl Makefile.pl; 
> make; make install" or whatever. Of course, Perl now has a chicken-setup 
> like utility -- and a CPAN shell to go with it -- but I never use it, 
> because I can't remember how to get to it. Maybe a full-time Perl hacker 
> will remember it, but I live in a world where in the space of a month, 
> I'm writing Perl, Python, Java, PostgreSQL stored procedures, Oracle 
> PL/SQL, and of course Chicken. There's only so much trivia the can fit 
> in my mind at once.

Yes, you're right here (not with the moron, but with the amount if trivia
one has to keep in mind when using many different languages).

> > (But I agree that this should perhaps be linked more "visible" from 
> > the main page)
>
>
> What if each egg had a boilerplate INSTALL file that said everything 
> that the top of the eggs page does?

Hm. If it's inside the egg, it might not be noted (many users don't
realize it's a tgz, actually). So I'm not sure where to put any
installation isntructions. One could of course also add an interactive
mode to chicken-setup, which might simplify things for new users.

> That's not what I meant, but that would indeed be a good idea. Perhaps a 
> sort of glossary/index/xref all in one?:
>
> Core input/output
>     display, read, write.
>
>     See also input/output.
>
> Input/output
>     core input/output, readline, sfio, srfi-38.
>
>     See also networking.
>
> I/O
>     See input/output.
>
> E-mail
>     See mail.
>
> ftp -- Basic FTP client.
>     ftp:connect, ftp:disconnect, ftp:ftp?, ftp:set-type!,
>     ftp:set-mode!, ftp:change-directory, ftp:open-list,
>     ftp:open-input-file, ftp:open-output-file, ftp:abort,
>     ftp:delete-file, ftp:rename-file, ftp:delete-directory,
>     ftp:create-directory
>
>     See also networking.
>
> Mail
>     pop3, smtp.
>
>     See also networking.
>
> Networking
>     ftp, http, pcap, pop3, smtp, spread,
>     tcp-server, udp.
>
> pop3 -- Mail retrieval via the POP3 protocol.
>     See also mail.
>
> sfio -- AT&T safe and fast input/output interface.
>
> srfi-38 -- Large object input/output [public domain]
>     See also input/output.
>
> . . .
>
> Now how would we automagically build such a thing?

IMHO, the most canonical representation of the docs in the
texinfo file. We could cobble something together, by
extracting stuff from chicken.texi and the egg html pages,
and from that point maintining it by hand.

(yes, I see that the optimal solution would be a single
format, perhaps SXML that is used both as the master for
the manual and the egg pages, but I currently simply don't
have the time for that)


cheers,
felix