On Fri, Sep 5, 2025 at 11:19 AM Nick Bowler <nbow...@draconx.ca> wrote: > > On Fri, Sep 05, 2025 at 03:49:47AM -0400, Nikolaos Chatzikonstantinou wrote: > > I am trying to "fix" the support of GNU Guile in Autotools. Guile > > ships its guile/meta/guile.m4 macros, that among other things, set > > GUILE_SITE to /usr/share/guile/site/3.0/ (on Debian 12) or similar. > > > > Since automake does not understand bin_PROGRAMS, etc, for Guile, > > programmers are forced to use _DATA to ship scheme files: > > > > foo_DATA = foo.scm > > foodir = $(GUILE_SITE)/foo > > > > This breaks `make distcheck`, as it attempts to install to a directory > > under /usr > > Right, under no circumstances should the default installation location > of any files be outside of the prefix. This is only acceptable for > installation directories explicitly specified by the user. > > The Automake manual has a section which discusses this challenge, > "Installing to Hard-Coded Locations"[1]. > > I'm not very familiar with GNU Guile. But I would suggest: > > - Have your configure script inspect the value of GUILE_SITE to try > and identify the suffix which is not related to Guile's datadir. In > your case I imagine that would be the /guile/site/3.0 part. Let's > suppose you set this in a shell variable called guilesitesuffix.
Your recommendation works by manipulating the paths provided by pkg-config, which AFAIK are provided by distributions. On Debian it's the datadir, but it could be arbitrary in theory, and not related to prefix/datadir. In particular, what should the m4 scripts do if the pkg-config path is unrelated to any autoconf prefixes or LHS directories? Another option would be for Guile to use prefix and all the rest. Can't it use GUILE_SITE=$(datadir)/guile/3.0/site and so on instead? I understand that Autotools is not a package manager, but ./configure && make && make install always does something sensible for C/C++. How can it be made to work this way for Guile too? Ideally one wouldn't even need EXTRA_DIST, as the programs could be specified with _GUILEPROGRAMS or similar. The .scm file suffix is shared between the Scheme flavors so that autoconf cannot deduce that Guile is in use; either offer _GUILEPROGRAMS or detect a special suffix (say .guile). This would allow programmers to specify their project just like in C, without having to worry about GUILE_SITE, EXTRA_DIST, _DATA, and so on. Isn't this the optimal solution? Regards, Nikolaos Chatzikonstantinou
