[PPL-devel] Compiling the PPL Debian package with SWI Prolog support

[Roberto Bagnara]

Israel Herraiz wrote:
> Excerpts from Roberto's message on Aug  5, 2009 about 11 AM:
>> the problem you describe seems more related to SWI-Prolog than to the PPL.
>> Anyway, I have tried to reproduce your observations on a machine where
>> we have Debian, but it is the Etch version.  Moreover, here is what I
>> obtain trying to install SWI-Prolog:
>>
>> debian:~# apt-get install swi-prolog
>> Reading package lists...
>> Building dependency tree...
>> E: Package swi-prolog has no installation candidate
>> Package swi-prolog is not available, but is referred to by another package.
>> This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
>> is only available from another source
> 
> Umm. I am trying with Debian Sid, which is the unstable version of
> Debian. It contains (somewhat) up to date packages. Among them, SWI
> Prolog.
> 
>> Any suggestion?  Which version of SWI-Prolog are you using?
>> Did you install it from sources?
> 
> I am using SWI Prolog 5.6.59, installed using the swi-prolog package
> of Debian Sid.
> 
> It can also be reproduced with the latest Ubuntu (9.04,
> Jaunty). If you want to try, I can provide instructions to compile the
> package in another message (it requires to modify the packaging
> scripts to add the SWI Prolog support, which is disabled by default).
> 
> In any case, if this is the first time you see this, it is likely that
> it is related to SWI Prolog, or to the packaging scripts, or both.
> 
> I have seen similar errors in the Debian bug tracking system, with
> other packages depending on SWI Prolog. However, the solution was not
> posted. I thought it could be related to the Prolog sources, that's
> why I asked here. I am going to contact the Debian maintainers of
> those packages, and of PPL, maybe they know how to fix it.
> 
> In the end, this means that I am going to ask for PPL support to be
> added to the official PPL Debian packages. I will post to this list if
> there is any news about this.

Hi Israel,

this would be great, thanks.

> Actually, I have managed to compile the packages, just skipping the
> tests, but I don't like this solution, because after all tests are
> there for something :-). If you are curious or you want to try the
> packages out, I can provide info about the repositories where I have
> the packages (only for Debian Sid and Ubuntu Jaunty).

We have upgraded to Lenny and now we are able to reproduce the problem.
Apparently, SWI-Prolog on Debian is packaged differently from, e.g.,
Fedora.  The attached patch solves the problem by making the
test code self-contained.  Please let us know if it works for you.
All the best, and thanks for the report,

     Roberto

-- 
Prof. Roberto Bagnara
Computer Science Group
Department of Mathematics, University of Parma, Italy
http://www.cs.unipr.it/~bagnara/
mailto:bagnara at cs.unipr.it
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