[racket-dev] building from a git checkout into a separate BUILD directory

From: Matthew Flatt (mflatt at cs.utah.edu)
Date: Sun Nov 3 13:28:46 EST 2013

At Sat, 19 Oct 2013 23:13:44 -0400, "David T. Pierson" wrote:
> I am building from a (relatively recent) git checkout.  I have been
> using the in-place make target which installs in ./racket, but I'd like
> to have everything built and installed in a separate BUILD directory.
> My motivations are to have a single directory to rm -r when I want to
> start over and secondly to have a single directory to exclude from my
> nightly backups.
> 
> I can get the base built with:
> 
>   mkdir BUILD
>   cd BUILD
>   ../racket/src/configure --prefix=$PWD
>   make && make install
> 
> but then I need to deal with packages.  I was able to hack the
> link-all.rkt to kinda work but the subsequent raco setup didn't seem to
> do anything significant.  I'm pretty sure my hack was the wrong approach
> anyway, so I won't detail my steps with that.
> 
> Is there an easy way to do what I want?

I can image providing better support for in terms of the
current repository structure. Most of the pieces are around (such as
the `local-catalog` makefile target), and it's a matter of tedious
makefile hacking to put them together.


But how well does it work to use

 bin/raco pkg install -i --auto main-distribution

at the end of the commands above?

Use `raco pkg install` pulls packages from the network, instead of from
a clone of the Racket repository, but we expect to split the Racket
repository up in the future, anyway (maybe sometime next year). Then,
we expect that pulling packages from the network will be the normal way
to do things.


Posted on the dev mailing list.