+-*-text-*-
Guile Hacking Guide
-Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 Free software Foundation, Inc.
+Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2008, 2012 Free software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the
However, to see what others have indicated as their interest (and avoid
potential wasteful duplication of effort), see file TODO. Note that
-the version you find may be out of date; a CVS checkout is recommended
-(see also file SNAPSHOTS).
+the version you find may be out of date; a CVS checkout is recommended:
+see below for details (see also the files ANON-CVS and SNAPSHOTS).
It's also a good idea to join the guile-devel@gnu.org mailing list.
See http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/mail/mail.html for more info.
Hacking It Yourself ==================================================
-As distributed, Guile needs only an ANSI C compiler and a Unix system
-to compile. However, Guile's makefiles, configuration scripts, and a
-few other files are automatically generated, not written by hand. If
-you want to make changes to the system (which we encourage!) you will
-find it helpful to have the tools we use to develop Guile. They
-are the following:
+When Guile is obtained from Git, a few extra steps must be taken
+before the usual configure, make, make install. You will need to have
+up-to-date versions of the tools as listed below, correctly installed.
-Autoconf 2.50 --- a system for automatically generating `configure'
+Sometimes older or newer versions will work. (See below for versions
+to avoid.)
+
+Then you must run the autogen.sh script, as described below.
+
+The same procedure can be used to regenerate the files in released
+versions of Guile. In that case the headers of the original generated
+files (e.g., configure, Makefile.in, ltmain.sh) can be used to
+identify which tool versions may be required.
+
+Autoconf --- a system for automatically generating `configure'
scripts from templates which list the non-portable features a
program would like to use. Available in
"ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/autoconf"
-Automake 1.4-p2 --- a system for automatically generating Makefiles that
+Automake --- a system for automatically generating Makefiles that
conform to the (rather Byzantine) GNU coding standards. The
nice thing is that it takes care of hairy targets like 'make
dist' and 'make distclean', and automatically generates
Makefile dependencies. Automake is available in
"ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/automake"
- Before using automake, you may need to copy `threads.m4' and
- `guile.m4' from the top directory of the Guile core disty to
- `/usr/local/share/aclocal.
-
-libtool 1.4 --- a system for managing the zillion hairy options needed
+libtool --- a system for managing the zillion hairy options needed
on various systems to produce shared libraries. Available in
- "ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libtool"
+ "ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libtool". Version 2.2 (or
+ later) is recommended (for correct AIX support, and correct
+ interaction with the Gnulib module for using libunistring).
+
+gettext --- a system for rigging a program so that it can output its
+ messages in the local tongue. Guile presently only exports
+ the gettext functionality to Scheme, it does not use it
+ itself.
+
+flex --- a scanner generator. It's probably not essential to have the
+ latest version.
+
+One false move and you will be lost in a little maze of automatically
+generated files, all different.
+
+Here is the authoritative list of tool/version/platform tuples that
+have been known to cause problems, and a short description of the problem.
+
+- automake 1.4 adds extraneous rules to the top-level Makefile if
+ you specify specific Makefiles to rebuild on the command line.
+
+- automake 1.4-p4 (debian "1:1.4-p4-1.1") all platforms
+ automake "include" facility does not recognize filenames w/ "-".
+
+- libtool 1.4 uses acconfig.h, which is deprecated by newest autoconf
+ (which constructs the equivalent through 3rd arg of AC_DEFINE forms).
+
+- autoreconf from autoconf prior to 2.59 will run gettextize, which
+ will mess up the Guile tree.
+
+- libtool 1.5.26 does not know that it should remove the -R options
+ that the Gnulib libunistring and havelib modules generate (because
+ gcc doesn't actually support -R).
+
+- (add here.)
+
+
+Sample GDB Initialization File=========================================
+
+Here is a sample .gdbinit posted by Bill Schottstaedt (modified to
+use `set' instead of `call' in some places):
+
+ define gp
+ set gdb_print($arg0)
+ print gdb_output
+ end
+ document gp
+ Executes (object->string arg)
+ end
+
+ define ge
+ call gdb_read($arg0)
+ call gdb_eval(gdb_result)
+ set gdb_print(gdb_result)
+ print gdb_output
+ end
+ document ge
+ Executes (print (eval (read arg))): ge "(+ 1 2)" => 3
+ end
+
+ define gh
+ call g_help(scm_str2symbol($arg0), 20)
+ set gdb_print($1)
+ print gdb_output
+ end
+ document gh
+ Prints help string for arg: gh "enved-target"
+ end
-flex 2.5.4 (or newer) --- a scanner generator. earlier versions will
- most probably work too.
+Bill further writes:
-You are lost in a little maze of automatically generated files, all
-different.
+ so in gdb if you see something useless like:
+
+ #32 0x081ae8f4 in scm_primitive_load (filename=1112137128) at load.c:129
+
+ You can get the file name with gp:
+
+ (gdb) gp 1112137128
+ $1 = 0x40853fac "\"/home/bil/test/share/guile/1.5.0/ice-9/session.scm\""
Contributing Your Changes ============================================
- If you have put together a change that meets the coding standards
-described below, we encourage you to submit it to Guile. The best
-place to post it is guile-devel@gnu.org. Please don't send it
-directly to me; I often don't have time to look things over. If you
-have tested your change, then you don't need to be shy.
-
-- Please submit patches using either context or unified diffs (diff -c
-or diff -u). Don't include a patch for ChangeLog; such patches don't
-apply cleanly, since we've probably changed the top of ChangeLog too.
-Instead, provide the unaltered text at the top of your patch.
-
-- For proper credit, also make sure you update the AUTHORS file.
-
-Please don't include patches for generated files like configure,
-aclocal.m4, or any Makefile.in. Such patches are often large, and
-we're just going to regenerate those files anyway.
-
-
-CVS conventions ======================================================
-
-- We use CVS to manage the Guile sources. The repository lives on
-subversions.gnu.org, in /cvs; you will need an
-account on that machine to access the repository. Also, for security
-reasons, subversions presently only supports CVS connections via the SSH
-protocol, so you must first install the SSH client. Then, you should
-set your CVS_RSH environment variable to ssh, and use the following as
-your CVS root:
-
- :ext:USER@subversions.gnu.org:/cvs
-
-Either set your CVSROOT environment variable to that, or give it as
-the value of the global -d option to CVS when you check out a working
-directory.
-
-For more information on SSH, see http://www.cs.hut.fi/ssh.
-
-The Guile sources live in several modules:
-
- - guile-core --- the interpreter, QuickThreads, and ice-9
- - guile-tcltk --- the Guile/Tk interface
- - guile-tk --- the new Guile/Tk interface, based on STk's modified Tk
- - guile-rgx-ctax --- the Guile/Rx interface, and the ctax implementation
- - guile-scsh --- the port of SCSH to guile, talk to Gary Houston
- - guile-www --- A Guile module for making HTTP requests.
-
-There is a mailing list for CVS commit messages; see README for details.
-
-- We check Makefile.am and configure.in files into CVS, but the
-"autogen.sh" script must be run from the top-level to generate the
-actual "configure" script that then must be run to create the various
-Makefile-s to build guile. The general rule is that you should be able
-to check out a working directory of Guile from CVS, and then type
-"./autogen.sh", then "configure", and finally "make". No
-automatically generated files should be checked into the CVS
-repository.
-
-- The .cvsignore file is contained in the repository, to provide a
-reasonable list of auto-generated files that should not be checked in.
-This, however, prohibits one from having local additions to the
-.cvsignore file (yes, you can modify it and never check it in, but
-that doesn't seem to be a good solution to me). To get around this
-problem, you might want to patch your cvs program so that it uses a
-.cvsignore-local file (say) instead of the one from the repository. A
-patch for this can be found at the very end of this file.
-
-- (Automake 1.4 only) Be sure to run automake at the top of the tree
-with no arguments. Do not use `automake Makefile' to regenerate
-specific Makefile.in files, and do not trust the Makefile rules to
-rebuild them when they are out of date. Automake 1.4 will add
-extraneous rules to the top-level Makefile if you specify specific
-Makefiles to rebuild on the command line. Running the command
-`autoreconf --force' should take care of everything correctly.
-
-- Make sure your changes compile and work, at least on your own
-machine, before checking them into the main branch of the Guile
-repository. If you really need to check in untested changes, make a
-branch.
-
-- Include each log entry in both the ChangeLog and in the CVS logs.
-If you're using Emacs, the pcl-cvs interface to CVS has features to
-make this easier; it checks the ChangeLog, and generates good default
-CVS log entries from that.
+described below, we encourage you to submit it to Guile. Post your
+patch to guile-devel@gnu.org.
+- We prefer patches generated using 'git format-patch'.
-Coding standards =====================================================
+- Provide a description in the commit message, like so:
+
+ 1-line description of change
-- Before contributing larger amounts of code to Guile, please read the
-documents in `guile-core/devel/policy' in the CVS source tree.
+ More extensive discussion of your change. Document why you are
+ changing things.
+
+ * filename (function name): file specific change comments.
+
+- For proper credit, also make sure you update the AUTHORS file
+(for new files for which you've assigned copyright to the FSF), or
+the THANKS file (for everything else).
+
+
+Coding standards =====================================================
- As for any part of Project GNU, changes to Guile should follow the
GNU coding standards. The standards are available via anonymous FTP
-O2 -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Wmissing-prototypes
+To make sure of this, you can use the --enable-error-on-warning option
+to configure. This option will make GCC fail if it hits a warning.
+
Note that the warnings generated vary from one version of GCC to the
next, and from one architecture to the next (apparently). To provide
a concrete common standard, Guile should compile without warnings from
have more work to do, and assures that everyone won't switch to the
most lenient compiler they can find. :)
-Note also that EGCS (as of November 3 1998) doesn't handle the
-`noreturn' attribute properly, so it doesn't understand that functions
-like scm_error won't return. This may lead to some silly warnings
-about uninitialized variables. You should look into these warnings to
-make sure they are indeed spurious, but you needn't correct warnings
-caused by this EGCS bug.
-
- If you add code which uses functions or other features that are not
entirely portable, please make sure the rest of Guile will still
function properly on systems where they are missing. This usually
manage without the deprecated definition.
4. Add an entry that the definition has been deprecated in NEWS and
- explain what do do instead.
+ explain what to do instead.
5. In file TODO, there is a list of releases with reminders about what
to do at each release. Add a reminder about the removal of the
deprecated defintion at the appropriate release.
-- When you make a user-visible change (i.e. one that should be
-documented, and appear in NEWS, put an asterisk in column zero of the
-start of the ChangeLog entry, like so:
-
-Sat Aug 3 01:27:14 1996 Gary Houston <ghouston@actrix.gen.nz>
-
-* * fports.c (scm_open_file): don't return #f, throw error.
-
-When you've written a NEWS entry and updated the documentation, go
-ahead and remove the asterisk. I will use the asterisks to find and
-document changes that haven't been dealt with before a release.
+- Write commit messages for functions written in C using the
+functions' C names, and write entries for functions written in Scheme
+using the functions' Scheme names. For example,
-- Please write log entries for functions written in C under the
-functions' C names, and write log entries for functions written in
-Scheme under the functions' Scheme names. Please don't do this:
+ * foo.c: Moved scm_procedure_documentation from eval.c.
- * procs.c, procs.h (procedure-documentation): Moved from eval.c.
+is preferred over
-Entries like this make it harder to search the ChangeLogs, because you
-can never tell which name the entry will refer to. Instead, write this:
-
- * procs.c, procs.h (scm_procedure_documentation): Moved from eval.c.
+ * foo.c: Moved procedure-documentation from eval.c.
Changes like adding this line are special:
Since the change here is about the name itself --- we're adding a new
alias for scm_map that guarantees the order in which we process list
elements, but we're not changing scm_map at all --- it's appropriate
-to use the Scheme name in the log entry.
-
-- There's no need to keep a change log for documentation files. This
-is because documentation is not susceptible to bugs that are hard to
-fix. Documentation does not consist of parts that must interact in a
-precisely engineered fashion; to correct an error, you need not know
-the history of the erroneous passage. (This is copied from the GNU
-coding standards.)
+to use the Scheme name in the commit message.
- Make sure you have papers from people before integrating their
changes or contributions. This is very frustrating, but very
until we have the necessary papers.
Once you accept a contribution, be sure to keep the files AUTHORS and
-THANKS uptodate. Feel free to remove authorship info from source files.
+THANKS uptodate.
- When you make substantial changes to a file, add the current year to
the list of years in the copyright notice at the top of the file.
- When you get bug reports or patches from people, be sure to list
them in THANKS.
+- Do not introduce trailing whitespace (and feel free to clean it up
+opportunistically, that is, if doing so is part of some other change).
+The goal is to reduce (and over time, eliminate) spurious diffs.
+
+For Emacs users:
+ (add-hook 'before-save-hook 'delete-trailing-whitespace)
Naming conventions =================================================
You can define the GUILE_DEBUG flag by passing --enable-guile-debug to
the configure script.
-- You'll see uses of the macro SCM_P scattered throughout the code;
-those are vestiges of a time when Guile was meant to compile on
-pre-ANSI compilers. Guile now requires ANSI C, so when you write new
-functions, feel free to use ANSI declarations, and please provide
-prototypes for everything. You don't need to use SCM_P in new code.
-
Jim Blandy, and others
-
-Patches ===========================================================
-
-This one makes cvs-1.10 consider the file $CVSDOTIGNORE instead of
-.cvsignore when that environment variable is set.
-
-=== patch start ===
-diff -r -u cvs-1.10/src/cvs.h cvs-1.10.ignore-hack/src/cvs.h
---- cvs-1.10/src/cvs.h Mon Jul 27 04:54:11 1998
-+++ cvs-1.10.ignore-hack/src/cvs.h Sun Jan 23 12:58:09 2000
-@@ -516,7 +516,7 @@
-
- extern int ign_name PROTO ((char *name));
- void ign_add PROTO((char *ign, int hold));
--void ign_add_file PROTO((char *file, int hold));
-+int ign_add_file PROTO((char *file, int hold));
- void ign_setup PROTO((void));
- void ign_dir_add PROTO((char *name));
- int ignore_directory PROTO((char *name));
-diff -r -u cvs-1.10/src/ignore.c cvs-1.10.ignore-hack/src/ignore.c
---- cvs-1.10/src/ignore.c Mon Sep 8 01:04:15 1997
-+++ cvs-1.10.ignore-hack/src/ignore.c Sun Jan 23 12:57:50 2000
-@@ -99,9 +99,9 @@
- /*
- * Open a file and read lines, feeding each line to a line parser. Arrange
- * for keeping a temporary list of wildcards at the end, if the "hold"
-- * argument is set.
-+ * argument is set. Return true when the file exists and has been handled.
- */
--void
-+int
- ign_add_file (file, hold)
- char *file;
- int hold;
-@@ -149,8 +149,8 @@
- if (fp == NULL)
- {
- if (! existence_error (errno))
-- error (0, errno, "cannot open %s", file);
-- return;
-+ error (0, errno, "cannot open %s", file);
-+ return 0;
- }
- while (getline (&line, &line_allocated, fp) >= 0)
- ign_add (line, hold);
-@@ -159,6 +159,7 @@
- if (fclose (fp) < 0)
- error (0, errno, "cannot close %s", file);
- free (line);
-+ return 1;
- }
-
- /* Parse a line of space-separated wildcards and add them to the list. */
-@@ -375,6 +376,7 @@
- struct stat sb;
- char *file;
- char *xdir;
-+ char *cvsdotignore;
-
- /* Set SUBDIRS if we have subdirectory information in ENTRIES. */
- if (entries == NULL)
-@@ -397,7 +399,10 @@
- if (dirp == NULL)
- return;
-
-- ign_add_file (CVSDOTIGNORE, 1);
-+ cvsdotignore = getenv("CVSDOTIGNORE");
-+ if (cvsdotignore == NULL || !ign_add_file (cvsdotignore, 1))
-+ ign_add_file (CVSDOTIGNORE, 1);
-+
- wrap_add_file (CVSDOTWRAPPER, 1);
-
- while ((dp = readdir (dirp)) != NULL)
-=== patch end ===
-
-This one is for pcl-cvs-2.9.2, so that `i' adds to the local
-.cvsignore file.
-
-=== patch start ===
---- pcl-cvs.el~ Mon Nov 1 12:33:46 1999
-+++ pcl-cvs.el Tue Jan 25 21:46:27 2000
-@@ -1177,7 +1177,10 @@
- "Append the file in FILEINFO to the .cvsignore file.
- Can only be used in the *cvs* buffer."
- (save-window-excursion
-- (set-buffer (find-file-noselect (expand-file-name ".cvsignore" dir)))
-+ (set-buffer (find-file-noselect
-+ (expand-file-name (or (getenv "CVSDOTIGNORE")
-+ ".cvsignore")
-+ dir)))
- (goto-char (point-max))
- (unless (zerop (current-column)) (insert "\n"))
- (insert str "\n")
-=== patch end ===
HCoop / bpt / guile.git / blobdiff