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

[Ivan Raikov]

  I apologize for the delayed response -- the mail server at my
university went down yesterday evening. To answer your question, I
didn't want to create a package without up-to-date documentation for
purely aesthetical reasons -- I just felt that the package would be
incomplete without the Texinfo documentation. I will try the same
build scripts on Chicken 2.5, and I'll let you know if they work with
it. I still much prefer to have the documentation included.

    The description in the control file is probably left over from the
1.6x days, when the Debian package was initially created, and I'm
guessing the description was copied from the original project
description. Feel free to improve it :-) In fact, it would probably
make sense to add the debian directory to the main Chicken SVN
repository, and make improvements to it there.

            
    -Ivan


"Brandon J. Van Every" <address@hidden> writes:

> 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
>