I'm excited to try the new 2.0.1 version of Guile.

I'm running Slackware64 13.37 and the latest version of Guile distributed with it is 1.8.8.

I see that this new version, as part of it's new capabilities, has a few new requirements.

I have built and installed libffi, libunistring and libgc according to their install instructions, but Guile's configure script can't find them.

I have tried manually creating libffi.pc libunistring.pc and libgc.pc files, which has allowed configure to get past the first two, but I still can't determine the correct name for libgc.

Further, I am now not confident that Guile will find these where it expects to find them in the end.

I would like to ask for some clarification of the install process for this new version of Guile, but I'm not sure whom to ask.

Their corresponding .pc files should be found in /usr/lib/pkgconfig . Nonetheless, I just completed an installation yesterday and will describe what I did.

Install libffi using the 12.2 slackbuild from slackbuilds.org .

Install gc (Guile calls this bdw-gc) using the 13.37 slackbuild from slackbuilds.org .

For libunistring, I did the following:


Now log in as root and perform the following:

For Guile, I originally edited Mr Volkerding's slackbuild but encountered a bug in the Guile code which precluded using the 2.0.1 Guile tarball. After many hours in IRC with the (wonderfully patient and helpful) Guile developers, the problem was resolved and corrected in the stable-2.0 GIT branch. The problem is only exhibited on certain 32-bit processors so you may wish to try updating the official slackbuild and use the 2.0.1 tarball (I don't think a newer tarball has been released yet); if the problem exists for your processor then your compile will fail.

I won't describe how I edited the slackbuild (because I never successfully compiled the guile package that way), however, here is what I did to build a package from GIT.

Now log in as root and perform the following:

You may need to adjust these steps for your architecture, but hopefully these instructions are of some use -- despite the fact that the result is not a "proper" Slackware package.

1 members found this post helpful.

Just wanted to note that libffi is part of gcc-java package. I think that's the reason why it's not in SBo anymore.

Thanks for that info. But then shouldn't the gcc-java package include a 'usr/lib/pkgconfig/libffi.pc' file?

If libffi can't be found by Guile otherwise, I guess it should. Might be a good idea to send Pat an email about this subject, since it concerns -current which will get new Guile version sooner or later.

Thanks!

I looked for SlackBuilds, I didn't think to look for older ones.

I prefer working with packages, but I didn't realize that was an option here.

I've tried using src2pkg in the past but haven't had it work consistently (it doesn't help that for its initial test and example it tries to untar and compile a text file).

I just assumed I'd have to go directly to 'configure, make, make install', which was fine until I ran into the pkg-config complications.

I'll try again (but differently this time) this weekend.

Yep, there it is. Maybe I should remember to search the Manifest first.

I'll update the libffi.pc that I created to refer to the one installed by the gcc-java pkg and uninstall the one I built that is now superfluous.

Is a *.pc file something that has to be created manually for every executable or library on the system?

This is the first time I've run across pkg-config but surely there's a better way...

The *.pc files typically ship with the source code or are generated by 'configure' (from a *.pc.in file). The original source code for libffi includes just such a libffi.pc.in file and it is a bit surprising to me that the gcj project 1) includes libffi as an internal library and 2) has removed the libffi.pc file.

I just installed the new guile according to the outline given by saulgoode above (Thank you SO much, Saul!).

I must have missed a step during the build of libunistring and ended up with an empty package that installed successfully but installed nothing. I was able to install libunistring with the generic make install.

I built the guile package with the newer 2.0.3 build instead of using git. All worked well and I now have a nicely upgraded guile.

It would be nice if the standard distro had this, or at least SlackBuilds...

I do not believe that slackbuilds.org typically provides scripts for newer versions of official Slackware packages.

This is a reasonable policy because Mr Volkerding's slackbuild scripts are so well written that, unless there have been significant changes upstream to the build process, merely running his .SlackBuild file in the same directory as the newer tarball (and a slack-desc) is sufficient to create an updated package.

Good point... I was just getting impatient to see the new features in guile 2.0

Thanks again...