Compiling Guile 1.9.x
It is a small reminder on how to compile Guile 1.9.x.
Prerequisites
You will need:
- libunistring.
- Boehm's garbage collector (libgc)
- libffi.
The latter is normally installed on any GNU/Linux system as a part of Gcc package.
Configuration
Guile's configure script relies on pkg-config to locate its
prerequisites. A very unfortunate choice, in my opinion. On most
boxes where I tried to configure it, a plain invocation of
configure
without additional options proved unable to
locate prerequisite components. One may, of course, edit pc
files to placate pkg-config, but it's rather
counter-productive. So, I prefer to simply ignore pkg-config
and get away without it.
That being said, and supposing you have Gcc version 4.2.4 and
libgc installed in /usr/local/include
, the
following command should correctly configure the package:
./configure LIBFFI_LIBS=-lffi LIBFFI_CFLAGS=-I/usr/lib/gcc/i486-slackware-linux/4.2.4/include \ BDW_GC_LIBS=-lgc BDW_GC_CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include
Once done with the configure, launch make
and
switch to some other activity. It is no use sitting and staring at
the monitor, because the build takes quite some time. On my box, for
example, the compilation lasted 23 minutes.