Using SLIB in 1.6.4

[Alan Grover]

I had some difficulty getting SLIB to work in Guile 1.6.4. The Guile
documentation is out of date for newer SLIBs.

Unpack/Install SLIB (version 3a1 or later). It seems most convenient to
move it to a spot in your %load-path.

guile> %load-path
("/usr/share/guile/site" "/usr/share/guile/1.6" "/usr/share/guile" ".")

I choose to put it at /usr/share/guile/1.6/slib. Obviously, you have to
have permission to put it there (and make it readable by appropriate users).


You have to build the catalog, as per SLIB's documentation/readme. In short:
# will create "slibcat" in the parent directory of slib
# As a user with permissions to create "slibcat":
% guile -l slib/guile.init
guile> (require 'new-catalog)

You could check for the slibcat, and its permissions. E.g.:
% ls -l /usr/share/guile/1.6/slibcat


The ice-9/slib module is broken. To preserve functionality of Guile code
that uses the ice-9/slib convention, recreate the module. Find the
ice-9/slib.scm module, and change it's contents to:

(define-module (ice-9 slib))
(load-from-path "slib/guile.init")

Make sure it's readable by appropriate users.



Now, you can use SLIB with:

(use-modules (ice-9 slib))