Testing for a GUILE installation

[David Allouche]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 02:32:31PM +0200, David Allouche wrote:
> 
> I am currently working on porting TeXmacs to work with guile-1.6.0.
> 
> I happened to notice that when you use "guile-config info top_srcdir"
> you get the string "top_srcdir_absolute@" instead of something like
> "/home/david/home/devel/guile-1.6.0".

But, you may ask, what is the use of top_srcdir to TeXmacs? Well,
TeXmacs goes to some length to test that GUILE is properly installed.

What it does is test for the existence of "ice-9/boot-9.scm" in
GUILE_LOAD_PATH. If that fails, it looks for a default GUILE_LOAD_PATH
with the following procedure:

datadir=`guile-config info datadir`
version=`guile-config info top_srcdir`
Drop substring of version up to the last '-'
Drop substring of version up to the first '/'
(Here $version is supposedly the complete version number)
Prepend "$datadir/guile/$version" to GUILE_LOAD_PATH
Look for "ice-9/boot-9.scm" in GUILE_LOAD_PATH.

I worked around the current bug in guile-config, by using
'guile --version' and doing a different parsing of the result. But I
would like to know if there is a recommended, less hackish, way of
testing that GUILE is correctly installed.

Also, for TeXmacs to work with guile-1.6.0 I have to avoid prepending
the "$datadir/guile/$version" to GUILE_LOAD_PATH, otherwise I get an
error:

    ERROR: Unbound variable: include-deprecated-features

Leaving GUILE_LOAD_PATH alone seems to work okay also with guile-1.4.
But then I wonder what was the use of that code...

FYI, I configured guile with --enable-deprecated=detailed.

-- 
David Allouche         | GNU TeXmacs -- Writing is a pleasure
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TeXmacs is NOT a LaTeX front-end and is unrelated to emacs.