path: root/lang/guile/pkg-descr

This is Guile iii.

Guile iii is a first pass at boiling Guile down to the bare bones.
Functionality that was previously included in the Guile kitchen sink
releases, such as Tcl/Tk support, has been moved to add on packages,
available separately.

The purpose of splitting the sources up this way is to allow different
packages to be maintained more or less independantly and to enable
people with very specific needs to build up an instance of Guile
containing exactly (and only) what they need.

The Guile iii is a sort of software backplane.  There are (as yet
undocumented) conventions for structuring a release that "plugs into"
this backplane and is built automaticly.  For example, the "gtcl"
distribution plugs into the backplane to provide various kinds of Tcl
integration with Guile.  That means that if you unpack "gtcl" into a
Guile source tree and rebuild, Tcl support will be in the newly built
version.

A kitchen-sink (aka "suggested configuration") distribution of Guile,
which includes many add-ons in the same tar file, may once again be
made available in the near future, once the bugs are worked out of the
backplane components.

Here is how the back-plane works.  First, unpack a guile-iii distribution:
	

	% tar -zxvf guile-iii.tar.gz 	
	[....]

That will create a subdirectory called "guile-src".

Then, *in the same place*, unpack a gtcltk distribution:


	% tar -zxvf gtcltk-0.tar.gz

That will unpack more files into "guile-src".

From there, use the usual configure-then-make procedure, as documented
in the file INSTALL.