[plt-scheme] collection not found error at startup

On Jun 30, Ari Pollak wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 7:29 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> > But it's not a good idea either way.  I'm assuming that you start
> > with some source tarball -- so why not have the plt-scheme package
> > and the mzscheme package start from the sources that we provide
> > for both of these?
> 
> That would be redundant, since the plt-scheme tarball includes
> mzscheme as well, so it doesn't make much sense to provide another
> copy of mzscheme.

It gives you an accurate division for what's in the mzscheme
distribution and what's in the plt distribution.  If you don't have
the resources that can make a proper division (like investing the time
to take our script and adapt it; or write your own dependency checking
script), then it's better to just drop the mzscheme package than
getting into such problems.  (Like I said, I suspect that people who
would be mzscheme-only users are probably people who are very
comfortable getting and installing it from source.)


> >> Except that 3m doesn't build on architectures other than i386 and
> >> amd64 (and maybe powerpc),
> >
> > I'm not aware of any compilation problems on other platforms, so I
> > find it unlikely that *no* platforms except for these two work.  If
> > you look at our builds, you'll see that it works on several others
> > (like an intel x86_64, and sparc-solaris), and there are also some
> > architectures that we don't have a machine to run builds on but I know
> > that things work fine (it even built fine on an ARM machine).
> 
> As of 371 a lot of them did not with 3m, and I haven't tried them with
> 372 or 4.0.

371 is close to a year old; there has been a *lot* that has changed
since then.  Looking at the logs, I see two segfaults during
compilation (I think that there were several problems that got
resolved since then), and what looks like a configuration problem on
alpha.  In any case, it's only three packages.


> I don't know of anyone using the mzscheme Debian package for a
> long-running server.

It's not only servers which are a problem, see my earlier message.


> But since mips & mipsel aren't even building CGC properly anymore,

If this is based on the 371 sources, then please try again.


> I'm about ready to give up and restrict the buildable architectures
> even further to just the ones being tested by you guys; certainly
> this should satisfy everyone except some unfortunate soul who was
> actually trying to run an mzscheme server on PA-RISC.

Well, it would help to have replayable bug reports -- the current
debian build seems to have a lot of tweaks, and changes that make it
very hard to solve problems.

Also, I had a bried scan of the current debian source tree (which I
got from http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/drscheme), and
there are many small issues.  Here are the ones I noticed:

* "README.Debian" has a nearly irrelevant comment, the plt tree is
  intended for plt packages, and it would be hard for people to modify
  it (or to modify it and expect things to work).

* "TODO.Debian" has an entry regarding splitting `data' packages.
  This can be tricky since there are some places in `compiled'
  directories that contain platform-dependent files (including one zo
  file that is platform dependent, since it contains compilation
  parameters).

* "control" has some antique text, in fact, it's so old that I don't
  know where you got it from (and it's visible, for example, on
  http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/drscheme).  PLT has
  no relations to Rice now, and other parts of this text are
  dangerously outdated to the point of misinformation.

* "copyright" makes it look like the plt readline library is GPLd,
  which is not true.  (There was a discussion of this a while ago on
  the list.)

* "mzscheme.files", some obvious things: we no longer include slatex
  and tex2page with the mzscheme distribution; web-server executable
  is missing as well as some executables that should definitely be
  included (plt-r[56]rs, scribble, planet); this granularity means
  that you get documentation sources to be included, which makes the
  documentation a problem for building (we distribute mzscheme with no
  documentation files at all, except for the release-notes directory);
  collections to remove: combinator-parser, slatex, tex2page;
  collections to add: file, r6rs, rnrs, s-exp, scheme, scribble,
  trace, wxme.

* All of the man pages that I have seen are outdated (eg, link to
  http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/).  Some of these are man pages that
  were removed, and the existing man pages were significantly
  simplified to refer to the documentation and to using a `--help'
  command line flag.

* Some of the patches seem questionable: why add `#include "schgc.h"'
  to "list.c"?  freetype2 should be detected by configure, why does it
  need a patch?  If the alpha patch is correct, then why not report it
  so we can fix it?

* "overrides/mzscheme" -- refers to ".../plt/collects/help/servlets",
  which no longer exists.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                  http://www.barzilay.org/                 Maze is Life!