[Chicken-hackers] Re: [Chicken-users] Chicken 2.41 for Debian stable (3.1)

[Brandon J. Van Every]

I'm moving this to chicken-hackers.


Ivan Raikov wrote:
>   The tarball for Chicken 2.5 doesn't have chicken.texi, and I didn't
> want to just use the texinfo file from 2.4. 

I'm ignorant of Debian packaging techniques and I don't have a Linux 
box.  Why can't chicken.texi just be skipped?


> I was referring to the
> Debian package build scripts that were used to build the Chicken 2.3
> packages for Debian. I have attached a tarball with those
> scripts. Just untar it in the directory where the Chicken source tree
> resides.
>
>   

I notice that the file "control" says:

Description: Simple Scheme-to-C compiler - compiler
CHICKEN is a Scheme compiler which compiles a subset of R5RS into C.
It uses the ideas presented in Baker's paper "Cheney on the MTA", and
is small and easily extendable, although not a production quality or
high-performance Scheme system.


I take issue with several of these statements.  First, unless I'm very 
mistaken, I don't think billing Chicken as only implementing "a subset 
of R5RS" is fair.  It may be strictly true, but it's also strictly true 
of almost every other Scheme out there.  I'll let other people chime in 
on whether Chicken is "production quality" or not; I think it probably 
is for some purposes.  I think to say it's "not a high performance 
Scheme system" is just plain out wrong.  It's not the highest performing 
Scheme out there, but it is certainly performance oriented.

Is this just outdated crud from some really old version of Chicken?  I 
would like to see these negative statements go away. 


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every

> "Brandon J. Van Every" <address@hidden> writes:
>
>   
> > Ivan Raikov wrote:
> >     
> > >   It turned out that it is quite painless to make Debian packages for
> > > Chicken 2.41 based on the 2.3 build scripts. If anyone is interested,
> > > I have built Chicken packages for Debian stable and placed them at the
> > > following repository:
> > >
> > >   deb http://www.neuro.gatech.edu/mrci/debian  stable main
> > >   deb-src http://www.neuro.gatech.edu/mrci/debian stable main
> > >
> > > In order to get those packages, add the above lines to
> > > /etc/apt/sources.list and do `apt-get update; apt-get upgrade`. I have
> > > also uploaded the source package, which is simply the Chicken 2.41
> > > tarball with the debian/ subdirectory from the Debian chicken-2.3
> > > package.
> > >       
> > The current Chicken release is 2.5.  Is there a reason you didn't use
> > this version?  Exactly which 2.3 build scripts are you referring to,
> > can you please send them to me?
> >
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Brandon Van Every
> >
> >
> >