Because Oaklisp uses itself to build itself, there is a bootstrap problem
with trying to build it completely "from scratch."
Therefore, the package has a build dependency upon itself - i.e. you have
to have the binary package installed to be able to build the package.

Actually the situation is not as bad as for, say, gcc, which requires
heroic effort to compile for a machine without a working C compiler.
This is because the oaklisp compiler produces architecture-neutral
bytecode as its output.  However, the "binary world" loaded by the
bytecode emulator is endianity-dependent.


Basically, to port to a new architecture Y with *the same endianity* as
a machine X of a different architecture which has a working oaklisp,
do the following:

 rebuild everything on X
 move the entire source tree to Y
 cd src/emulator; make clean

now go ahead and build and package, everything should be okay


If X and Y have different endianities, you're still okay.  Do
everything as above, except after you copy the tree do the following
additional steps

 cd src/emulator; make clean
 cd src/world; rm *.bin

In a pinch, you only need the following file to be able to do the build:
	/usr/lib/oaklisp/oakworld.bin

However, the file must be for the correct "endian-ness" of your machine.
Please contact either the upstream author or the maintainer if you need this
file or have questions.

 -- Barak A. Pearlmutter <bap@debian.org>, Thu, 30 Dec 2010 17:45:13 -0500
