While testing out The Quiet Learner‘s game, Dr. Theobold, a text based adventure game written in picolisp, I ran into several issues. As discussed previously, I added these issues to the bug tracker on Savannah. Come to find out, the distributed packages for Ubuntu are using version 15.xxx of picolisp, and The Quiet Learner wrote his program for version 16+. We needed to find out if the old version was the culprit, or if there truly were issues in the game.
So, I updated to version 17.7.6 (a rather interesting numbering, since I tried this the 4th of July week, but that is something else entirely).
As simple as the above statement was, my trek was not quite as simple. I am used to compiling programs. Typically, you start by unzipping the source, using ./configure, then make, and sudo make install. However, this was different.
Of course, I downloaded the source from the link in the PicoLisp Wiki. After that, I unzipped it with the standard
$ tar -xzvf ./picoLisp.tgz
and moved into the new director with
$ cd picoLisp
Once there my usual bag of tricks didn’t work, which is why it is always good to read the instructions. Ends up that I needed to cd into the src64 directory and run make. No ./configure first.
$ cd src64
$ make
And there was no option to make install. Instead I had to manually symbolically link the files, and that is where everything went wrong. You see, the INSTALL file had pre-typed instructions with all 3 links you could use, like so:
# ln -s /<installdir> /usr/lib/picolisp
# ln -s /usr/lib/picolisp/bin/picolisp /usr/bin
# ln -s /usr/lib/picolisp/bin/pil /usr/bin
But after doing that, it didn’t work. It didn’t work because I forgot that the directory was picoLisp, not picolisp. I chased my tail for a while, re-creating the same bad links over and over again until I realized my mistake. Since /<installdir> was not the directory (obviously) I was hand typing picolisp, and it wasn’t working. So, be smart and not like me. Do as I now say, not as I erroneously did!
After straightening it out, it worked great! Actually it cleared up 3 of the issues that I put on the tracker for the Dr. Theobold game. I guess it pays to have the latest and the greatest when it comes to PicoLisp!
Linux – keep it simple.