Re: [MIT-Scheme-devel] ephemerons in fasl files

[Taylor R Campbell]

   Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2010 22:21:26 -0400
   From: Gerald Jay Sussman <address@hidden>

   The make-scmutils script is OK and doesn't need any frobbing (although
   I have to specialize it for different options).  The problem is
   knowing how to make the Scheme binary distribution tar (with
   documentation) that it uses.

The problem is that the Scheme binary distribution format changed.
Formerly, we made a different binary distribution, containing both
compiled Scheme code and compiled C code, for each combination of
machine architecture and operating system, with the set of operating
systems varying kind of randomly.  Thus, there might have been

mit-scheme-X.Y.Z-ix86-apple-darwin
mit-scheme-X.Y.Z-ix86-freebsd
mit-scheme-X.Y.Z-ix86-gnu-linux
mit-scheme-X.Y.Z-ix86-netbsd
mit-scheme-X.Y.Z-ix86-openbsd
mit-scheme-X.Y.Z-ix86-sun-solaris
mit-scheme-X.Y.Z-amd64-apple-darwin
mit-scheme-X.Y.Z-amd64-freebsd
mit-scheme-X.Y.Z-amd64-gnu-linux
mit-scheme-X.Y.Z-amd64-netbsd
mit-scheme-X.Y.Z-amd64-openbsd
mit-scheme-X.Y.Z-amd64-sun-solaris
...&c.

This is an exaggeration (really, there were only two or three OSs),
but distributing any OS-dependent compiled C code caused problems.  We
changed the format to exploit the fact that the compiled Scheme code
is OS-independent, so now there is one binary distribution per machine
architecture, which contains compiled Scheme code and uncompiled C
code (and with the machine architecture names tweaked, for no
particularly good reason):

mit-scheme-X.Y.Z-i386
mit-scheme-X.Y.Z-x86-64

This is an improvement, but the make-scmutils script doesn't know how
to handle the new format of distributions.  I will attempt to address
this tomorrow.