mit-scheme: Update to 10.1.11

[hnarayanan (Harish Narayanan)]

The current version of mid-scheme in MacPorts is 9.2.3 that is quite out of date. The current stable release is 10.1.11.

I would be willing to help update to this release if guided.

[drkp (Dan Ports)]

So, the main reason this port hasn't been updated in a while (besides lack of time) is that we used to build from the portable C implementation of MIT Scheme, and there isn't a release of that for the 10.x releases.

We could probably build from the portable SVM version, or install the binary distribution.

If you'd like to help, it'd be great to know if the SVM release compiles.

[hnarayanan (Harish Narayanan)]

Thank you for the clarification. I can confirm that the binary release at ​https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mit-scheme/stable.pkg/10.1.11/ installs as intended. I didn’t realise it was binary as it also had some elements that need to be compiled.

I will try to get the SVM version installed and see if it goes smoothly or I stumble on something.

[hnarayanan (Harish Narayanan)]

I have gone through and tried options on ​https://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/ and can confirm the following:

1. The package marked as 'Source' ​https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mit-scheme/stable.pkg/10.1.11/mit-scheme-10.1.11.tar.gz builds and installs following standard commands (./configure --prefix=something; make; make install). I believe this is the portable C implementation you are looking for.

2. The package marked as 'Portable SVM' ​https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mit-scheme/stable.pkg/10.1.11/mit-scheme-10.1.11-svm1.tar.gz seems to be a generic Unix 64-bit binary release. I am not super sure how to install it without borking my local setup where I have (1) above working and working well, Also, internet searches seem to suggest it is not the safest bet ​https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/52925.

[drkp (Dan Ports)]

Okay, I looked into this a bit more. It seems that there is not really any meaningful way to build mit-scheme from source without a working binary of itself to bootstrap from. The portable C implementation that used to exist had the scheme code compiled down to a C backend.

I'm surprised that you were able to get the regular source to build -- I thought that required a scheme interpreter to build, so maybe you already had another version of mit-scheme installed?

In light of all that, it sounds like our best option is probably to start with one of the binary releases. It does limit us to a specific architecture, but not sure that can be helped.

The mit-scheme x86_64 packages do seem to build okay for me on my system. I haven't gotten it to build through the portfile yet, but I'm sure that's solvable...

[hnarayanan (Harish Narayanan)]

I don't know how I could have had other scheme interpreter to bootstrap the build. I shall investigate, but your thought of working with the binary releases does sound like a constraining but feasible path forward.

This might have some unfortunate consequence for ARM Macs.