[Ecls-list] Providing contributed modules

[Juan Jose Garcia Ripoll]

Julian Stecklina wrote:

>just for my understanding: To add a module in contrib/ one needs to:
>1. put the directory into contrib/
>2. add an appropriate AC_ARG_WITH(foo, ...) line to src/configure.in
>3. add a line that checks for foo and pushes foo onto ECL_MODULES to
>   src/configure.in
>  
>
Roughly the syntax is
AC_ARG_WITH(module,
    AS_HELP_STRING([--with-module], [include module (default is YES)]),
    [module="${withval}"],[module=yes])
plus a line like
    if "$module" = yes; then
       ECL_MODULES="${ECL_MODULES} module"
    fi
where 'module' is the name of the module you want to build. For the 
magic in the compile.lsp file you can just copy the lines of ASDF or 
CLX: the routine build-module takes care of compiling all the files into 
the given directory, and produces a FASL file with the name of the module.

>Is is complete? I plan to add support for asdf-install, too. With those
>two packages one could quite easily download all other packages one
>might need.
>
Yes that's all. Indeed you have read my mind. The 'contrib' directory is 
intended for modules that have to deal with internals of ECL and the 
only reason I committed ASDF is to be able to also hack on asdf-install 
at some point -- which I'd rather let you do, if you are interested :-)

What I would not like to do is to duplicate efforts -- like including 
modules that can already be retreived from existing archives.

I'd rather also not get misunderstood and think that I favor ASDF over 
defsystem. I personally find myself more comfortable with defsystem, but 
this file is already maintained in a separate arxiv and I fear Marco 
would not be very happy if I accidentally ship ECL with an out of date 
version :-)

Juanjo