Re: [q-lang-devel] Status of debian packaging

[<Dr....@t-...>]

Kari Pahula wrote:
> Of course I had to run libtoolize too.  There may still be issues with
> it, but it seems to be in usable state already.  I put the Debian
> package available at http://users.utu.fi/~kaolpa/debian/.

Kari, I really have to thank you a lot for all your work on this. :) 
I'll provide a pointer to your page on the Q website asap. BTW, on which 
Debian system(s) will that package work? I guess that the different 
library versions available will make it necessary to distribute separate 
packages for woody, sarge and sid, no?

I know that this is asking too much, but if you have some spare time 
maybe you could try to port the latest version, 5.1, as well? The 
installation layout hasn't changed much (just one new binary, qcwrap, 
going to <prefix>/bin). The new interpreter has some important new 
features, though, (e.g., full tail call elimination, Haskell-like [X..Y] 
enumeration syntax, Q->C translator) which should make the upgrade 
worthwhile. ;-)

I hope that I soon have the time to install Debian on my development box 
so that I can try out your port myself. Then we can see whether we can 
get the other packages ported, too.

> It'd be a good idea to build the included libraries only
> conditionally.  glob and regex are part of libc6, thus available on
> linux systems universally.  ltdl and readline are commonly present
> too.  Only ltdl was configurable to use the library present in the
> system.

Building the libraries *is* conditional. Configure will check what 
libraries are there and will then only build the modules for which the 
corresponding libraries are available.

Concerning readline: You can force configure to use the installed 
library with --with-rl=-lreadline. Actually, that's what I do to build 
the system on other Linux distros, where I use a configure line like the 
following:

CFLAGS="-O3" ./configure --prefix=/usr --with-rl=-lreadline

(BTW, if you didn't use -O3 with your build, consider doing that, too, 
it makes a *great* difference, the interpreter will run much faster than 
with the default "-g -O2" flags.)

Concerning glob and regex: I originally included these to resolve 
portability issues, specifically with Solaris and OSX which have system 
libs which are incompatible with the GNU versions. I could add configure 
flags to use the libc versions, or even make that the default behaviour 
on Linux, but as these libs are only a few KB I don't know whether it's 
really worth the effort.

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikwissenschaft.uni-mainz.de/~ag