2.2.1 Making scmlit

The SCM distribution Makefile contains rules for making scmlit, a “bare-bones” version of SCM sufficient for running build. build is a Scheme program used to compile (or create scripts to compile) full featured versions of SCM (see Building SCM). To create scmlit, run ‘make scmlit’ in the scm/ directory.

Makefiles are not portable to the majority of platforms. If you need to compile SCM without ‘scmlit’, there are several ways to proceed:

• Use the build web page to create custom batch scripts for compiling SCM.
• Use SCM on a different platform to run build to create a script to build SCM;
• Use another implementation of Scheme to run build to create a script to build SCM;
• Create your own script or Makefile.

Finding SLIB

If you didn’t create scmlit using ‘make scmlit’, then you must create a file named scm/require.scm. For most installations, scm/require.scm can just be copied from scm/requires.scm, which is part of the SCM distribution.

If, when executing ‘scmlit’ or ‘scm’, you get a message like:

ERROR: "LOAD couldn't find file " "/usr/local/src/scm/require"

then create a file require.scm in the SCM implementation-vicinity (this is the same directory as where the file Init5f3.scm is). require.scm should have the contents:

(define (library-vicinity) "/usr/local/lib/slib/")

where the pathname string /usr/local/lib/slib/ is to be replaced by the pathname into which you unzipped (or installed) SLIB.

Alternatively, you can set the (shell) environment variable SCHEME_LIBRARY_PATH to the pathname of the SLIB directory (see Environment Variables). If set, this environment variable overrides scm/require.scm.

Absolute pathnames are recommended here; if you use a relative pathname, SLIB can get confused when the working directory is changed (see chmod). The way to specify a relative pathname is to append it to the implementation-vicinity, which is absolute:

(define library-vicinity
  (let ((lv (string-append (implementation-vicinity) "../slib/")))
    (lambda () lv)))