[Ecls-list] Some issues with ecl v0.6

[Dave Pearson]

Having just recently downloaded, built and installed ecls on my machine I
thought the developers might be interested in a couple of issues that arose.
None seem to be real show-stoppers but I thought they might be worth
raising.

First off, something that's actually got nothing to do with ecls itself, but
the topmost link on <URL:http://ecls.sourceforge.net/> is a broken link in
that it is doubly prefixed with "http://".

The first problem I had with ecls was during the "make install". I use
`stow' for software that I'm not installing from packages and, because I was
installing ecls from source, I was going to stow that. I ensured that
/usr/local/stow/ecls was created and then configured ecls with:

,----
| ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/stow/ecls
`----

Configuration took place without any problems, `make' worked too. Where I
had problems was with "make install". Calls to `install' don't appear to be
ensuring that the required directories are made before attempting to install
anything. This resulted, for example, in an executable file called
/usr/local/stow/ecls/bin being created where /usr/local/stow/ecls/bin should
have been a directory that contained `ecls'.

The solution here was to hand create the bin directory. Further similar
problems arose regard the installation of the man pages and the libraries.

The second problem I had with ecls was when I tried to follow the
documentation on how to build a stand-alone executable. I've since found
<URL:http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=1008895&forum_id=1307>
which explains part of the problem I experienced but it's probably worth
noting that the documentation still differs from what you have to do. The
documentation (which doesn't mention needing to load "cmp") says that you
should call `c:build-program' but `c::build-program' is what needs to be
called. It would seem that either the documentation needs to be updated or
that `build-program' needs to be exported from the compiler package.

-- 
Dave Pearson
http://www.davep.org/