Loading modules

[Alex Stark <stark@niss.org>]

I am having severe trouble just loading a module.  The documentation is
not much help.

I am not particularly idiotic, and I have written a matrix handling
library, so...

Where is a simple description of the following?
1) How to put an scm module somewhere in my home space unrelated to the
current directory, set a path variable and then just load the thing w/o
the path name;
2) How I would do the same for a shared library.

With regard to (2), I find this excerpt from the info file strange:

End of "Node: Dynamic Linking and Compiled Code Modules"

   "Note that we used a symlink to make `libbessel.so' appear in the
right spot.  This is probably not a bad idea in general.  The
directories that the `%load-path' normally contains are supposed to
contain only architecture independent files.  They are not really the
right place for a shared library.  You might want to install the
libraries somewhere below `exec_prefix' and then symlink to them from
the architecture independent directory.  This will at least work on
heterogenous systems where the architecture dependent stuff resides in
the same place on all machines (which seems like a good idea to me
anyway)."


Why do I find this unacceptable?  Because shared libraries are becoming
a natural part of modular programming, and it should be easy for me to
put my .scm modules and .so libraries where I like in my home space,
just as I do with binaries.  The above paragraph (and nearby text) is
very
complex and doesn't tell me how to do this!

Alex.



-- 
Dr Alex Stark,                             mailto:stark@niss.org
Post-doctoral Fellow, National Institute of Statistical Sciences  
   P.O. Box 14006, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-4006, USA
http://www.niss.org/~stark            919-685-9328 Tel; 9310 Fax