 Installation instructions for CLX
-----------------------------------

Basically CLX comes as a module, which should make things easy.

1. Fetch the clx distribution 

    ftp://clisp.cons.org/pub/lisp/clisp/packages/nclx-1997-06-12.tar.gz

   You probably had done this already, since you are reading this file!

2. Unpack the distribution

     % cd somewhere/clisp-YYYY-MM-DD/src/
     % tar zxf nclx-1997-06-12.tar.gz

   This creates a directory clx-1997-06-12, which contains the module set and
   the demos.

3. Then attempt to create the link set:

     % clisp-link add-module-set clx-1997-06-12 base base+clx

  If everything works then you want to try out the two demos. Otherwise read
  the 'Problems' section below.


 Problems
----------

Some problem I had, or I could think of:

- Really bad thing: You probably need gcc to compile CLX, since I used
  gccism some times. I expect that I fix that very soon.

- To compile CLX correctly you need a CLISP, which has the foreign pointer
  data type. Under some circumstances it is there, under some other it not
  there. If it is not there, then a quick hack will do: Edit the makefile in
  your CLISP source tree and add '-DFOREIGN=void*' to the CFLAGS make
  variable and rebuild your CLISP. The source barks itself.

- The outlook of the DYNAMIC_ARRAY macro from lispbibl.d change somewhen
  between the 1996-05-30 and the 1996-07-22 release of CLISP, so you might
  want to toggle the argument to '#if' near the start in 'clx.e'. Just grep
  for DYNAMIC_ARRAY, there is comment in clx.e at the right spot.

- You may not want or have the xpm lib. So just switch it off. 
  Go into clx-1997-06-12/Makefile and change

    WANTS = -DWANT_XSHAPE=1 -DWANT_XPM=1

  into

    WANTS = -DWANT_XSHAPE=1 -DWANT_XPM=0
  
  Then you need to edit clx-1997-06-12/link.sh and remove '-lXpm' from the
  NEW_LIBS variable.

- You may not want or have the shape extension. Same thing as above -- switch
  it off. Go into clx-1997-06-12/Makefile and change

    WANTS = -DWANT_XSHAPE=1 -DWANT_XPM=1

  into

    WANTS = -DWANT_XSHAPE=0 -DWANT_XPM=1
  
  Then you need to edit clx-1997-06-12/link.sh and remove '-lXext' from the
  NEW_LIBS variable.

- Usage of comment5 is hard coded in the Makefile, because I do not know how
  to do it the right way. I want to fix this soon.

- Be expected to do some things of the built process by hand. The whole
  module stuff seems to be somewhat fragile, that was whoever my
  experience. [Very strange things happened this morning.]

- [all Linux stuff]
  Beginning this week I had a heisenbug. It costs me several hours to find
  the reason. Most time I was trying to recapture the bug, one little change
  in the code and the bug disappeared. I nailed it down to a realloc call,
  which modified my data (err not mine, more Bruno's since it was in the
  garbage collector.) I graped the libc sources from the net to go into the
  realloc routine to see what is going on. But all variant of recompiled
  libc refused to show the bug. Finally I decided to believe, that the new
  malloc in libc (They have a new one now, not the old gnu one and I trust
  Brunos code) is broken. So I encourage to use the gnu malloc library if
  you see strange things happen. [This was libc-5.3.9 and 5.4.7 was even
  worse]

I tried the module stuff with a clean 1996-07-22 version of CLISP. Using the
1996-05-30 version, where most of my development were done, I was not able
to perform a proper clisp-link. I have a total different layout and
different Makefile for building clx. Lots files of my development tree are
heavily hacked here and there.

-------
Fri Oct 11 1996
Gilbert Baumann <gilbert@ma2s2.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de>
