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Chicken hackers guide
This document is intended to provide some guidance for those who want to work on the chicken compiler and core libraries.
Getting the sources
The current trunk can be checked out with subversion from https://galinha.ucpel.tche.br/svn/chicken-eggs/chicken/trunk.
Username: anonymous Password: <empty>
Building
To build chicken, change into the source directory and follow the directions in the README file.
Some notes:
- every invocation of make must include the full set of parameters ("PLATFORM=..." etc.)
- if you change anything to makefiles or support scripts, make sure to run make confclean, so that a new configuration (chicken-config.h) is generated.
- it is possible to compile chicken without a preinstalled chicken by invoking make bootstrap, which extracts a set of precompiled C sources from a tarball, but this should only been done once, or if you have broken your chicken executable and have no other installed. Passing CHICKEN=<path-to-chicken-executable> to make will use the Scheme compiler given instead of the one found in the PATH.
- run make check occasionally.
- it is no problem to install different chicken versions all over the filesystem, provided each installation uses a different setting for the PREFIX parameter variable passed to make. Once installed, the executables will pick up the correct libraries.
Versions
There are several versions that identify a particular chicken installation:
- the "major version" (i.e. 3 in 3.0.0) - this version identifies which set of eggs is available from http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org via chicken-setup.
- the subversion revision number - it is calculated via a script (svnrevision.sh durng the build.
- the "binary compatibility version" - the egg-repository for an installation is specific to that (eggs are installed in PREFIX/lib/chicken/<binaryversion>/), changing this version means all eggs have to be re-installed and are not binary compatible to previous chicken versions.
- the official chicken version (3.0.0 for example) - it is used in several places, use scripts/setversion -set <version> to update the version string in all files that need it.
Releases
Currently we have several branches in the toplevel chicken svn directory:
- trunk
- here is where daily development takes place
- prerelease
- a staging branch to hold a certain version shortly before a final release
- release
- the code here is automatically tarred and pushed to http://chicken.wiki.br/releases
It is recommended to use private branches for personal hacking and merge changes into trunk after informing the other core developers.
Files added to the distribution tarball must be listed in the distribution/manifest file. You must add any files that are to distributed in that file.
For information on the current Chicken release policy, please see release-policy.
Documentation
The README should contain all required information to build the system, there is not separate INSTALL file. At the end platform-specific information is kept and should be reasonably up to date.
All user-visible changes between releases should be noted down in the NEWS file, to make it easy to see things to look out for or new features to explore.
The user's manual is kept in svnwiki format in manual/. The manual pages are a copy of the manual found at http://chicken.wiki.br/The User's Manual and should contain the complete documentation of everything implemented in this particular branch (or trunk) of the system you have checked out. Once a release is made, the changes from the manual/ directory should be merged back into the wiki proper (the wiki/ directory in the toplevel of the svn repository).
Please add all contributors and bug reporters to the Acknowledgements file in the manual. We should make sure contributors get the respect they deserve, unless someone explicitly doesn't want to get mentioned there.
Mailing lists
The chicken-hackers mailing list is the place to discuss implementation issues and subjects of hacking the core system.
chicken-users should be reserved for questions about CHICKEN in general and its extensions.
Finally, chicken-janitors collects daily maintenance information. Here bug reports generated by chicken-bug(1) are mailed to and the automatic builds and post-commit egg uploads report problems or news to this list as well.