comments on building newLISP on Solaris and Linux

[gregben]

Happy New Year!



I just downloaded and built version 9.0.0 on Solaris 8

and these are a few thoughts.



# Building under Linux, Solaris, and other Unix derivatives.



create make targets 'check' and 'test' which are synonyms

and run the qa-* scripts. The qa-* scripts along with any

related information should be relocated to a subdirectory

'test' in the source distribution.



The qa-* scripts should look for the newly built newLISP

executable in .. rather than /usr/bin/newlisp since newlisp

should not/may not have been installed yet, so:

#!../newlisp

rather than:

#!/usr/bin/newlisp



The default installation location for the newlisp executable

should be /usr/local/bin rather than /usr/bin. On the systems

I administer /usr/bin is used for rather static programs provided

as part of the core distribution and is not used for add-on

applications or utilities. In the specific case of Sun Solaris,

the programs in /usr/bin are checked using md5sums against Sun's

database to insure that the programs haven't been compromised

by a rootkit. By keeping /usr/bin free of add-on programs it is

easier to validate the programs.