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1.3 Building ECL

  1. Obtain the distribution from http://ecls.sourceforge.net. The distribution is in a gzip-compressed tar file named like ecl.tgz
  2. Prepare a directory (hereafter called ECL directory) for ECL. In the following examples, we suppose that the ECL directory is /usr/local/ecl.
  3. Extract the content from the compressed tar file.
    $ zcat ecl.tgz | tar xf -
    
  4. An auto configuration mechanism allows you to perform a standard installation with the following commands:
    $ ./configure
    

    This example will prepare to install executable files, manual pages and info files in standard directories like /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/man/man1, /usr/local/info.

  5. If you don't have access rights to these directories, you should give to configure alternate places. Try ./configure --help for instructions on how to supply this information to configure, but a good starting point is
    $ ./configure –prefix=$HOME
    
  6. Next you must build the program and install it
    $ make
         $ make install
    

At the end of installation, the destination directories will contain several files. If you have not modified these directories when invoking configure the layout should be

Executable files:
$HOME/bin/ecl the ECL interpreter and compiler
Help documents:
$HOME/lib/ecl/help.doc data for the online help
$HOME/man/man1/ecl.1 manual page for ECL
$HOME/info/ecl.info this manual you are reading
Library files and headers:
$HOME/lib/ecl/libecl.a the core library in C
$HOME/lib/ecl/libgmp.a GNU library for bignums
$HOME/lib/ecl/libgc.a Boehm-Weiser garbage collector
$HOME/lib/ecl/*.a Other lisp compiled code
$HOME/lib/ecl/ecl/ Header files

You can remove all intermediate files produced during installation with the command make clean.