[Chicken-hackers] testers for new CHICKEN 5 install needed

[felix . winkelmann]

Hello!

I'm currently trying to implement the new egg-install for CHCIKEN 5
and if people like to contribute by testing this, I would be very grateful.

The branch is "chicken-5-new-egg-install", in the chicken repo. The main
"innovation" is a new egg description file format, that can be statically
processed, without executing user code.

There is a tarball with a set of (inofficial) eggs at

    http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/c5-eggs.tgz

Look at the .egg files in there to get an idea of the format.
There is not much documentation yet (i.e. none), but I hope to
add it to the manual soon.

To use the local egg tree with C5, modify the setup.defaults file
like this:

    (location "<path-to-eggs>/c5-eggs")

Where <path-to-eggs> is the location of the directory where the
unpacked c5-eggs.tgz resides.

The branch may not be up to date with recent commits to the
chicken-5 branch, I will do that from time to time, unless others
do.

The new install also performs a few more checks and separates
the building and linking stages by generating two scripts
("build.sh" + "install.sh"), invoke chicken-install with "-n" to
just produce these scripts without running them.

There is also a cache (default: ~/.chicken-install.cache) that
receives retrieved eggs and which is used for building. Care
has been taken to make sure the cache doesn't become stale,
which doesn't mean that it always succeeds in doing so, of
course. The idea is to reduce download time and avoid
unnecessary build steps.

Static linking _should_ work out of the box, but I've only done
a very limited number of tests.

Note that testing on Mac/IWindows hasn't been done at all, yet.
Testing that would be great.

I'll attach my notes, perhaps they are of some help.

Sorry again for the little documentation. Please feel free to
play around with the system.

All of this is not officially reviewed and/or accepted, yet.
But the general direction has been agreed upon, at least
to my understanding. There may be misinterpretations on my
side and I may have overlooked some things completely.

Please contact me or write on this list if you have any questions,
problems or suggestions. I may not be able to fix them right away, but at
least I can collect all issues.


felix

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