Re: [bug-libmatheval] Why is guile-config required by libmatheval ?

[Aleksandar Samardžić]

On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 11:19:38PM +0100, Romain Garbi wrote:
> 
> I have downloaded libmatheval a few days ago to use it in one of my
> projects. This is a good and convenient tool, great job.
> 
> However, I was wondering why the ./configure script requires me to have the
> package guile-config installed in order to make the compilation process
> possible. This is even more annoying since guile-config installation design
> is so convenient that I had to download and install at least 5 packages to
> get it work. I was also struck by the fact that libmatheval has apparently
> no dependencies on guile-config, confirmed by the fact that it builds easily
> under windows, using only a few tricks to configure the build manually.
> 
> Anyway, has anyone an explanation ?

Yes - Guile is an official GNU project extension language (see, for
example, here:  http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html), and for this
reason libmatheval contains Guile wrappers for routines it offers, and
libmatheval test suite is written in Guile.

It is indeed true that nowadays there exist number of distributions that
are not including Guile by default.  On the other side, the fact that
installing Guile requires, or not, installing additional packages is
completely dependent on particular distribution you are using.

Regards,
Alex