To install a precompiled binary distribution of d2c, go to one of the FTP
sites listed in the README and download an appropriate package for your
operating system. Tarballs are available for several common Unix-like
systems and a variety of processors. RPMs and other “packaged” binaries are
slowly becoming available as well.

Binary tarballs are currently designed to untar into /usr/local on most
platforms. If you want to put them somewhere else, please see the section
on relocating binaries below. “Packaged” binaries such as RPMs install
wherever convention would have them install, and need no tweaking.

To install a source distribution, you’ll first need to install a binary
distribution. This is because large parts of Gwydion Dylan are written in
Dylan. (If you only want to install Mindy, you don’t need the binary
distribution. Just pass the option ‘–disable-d2c’ to configure.)
You can also bootstrap d2c with mindy, but this will take a day or two,
even on fast machines. Pass ‘–enable-mindy-bootstrap’ to configure
in order to do that.

Once you have binaries installed, grab a source snapshot from the FTP site
or download one from CVS (see the website mentioned in the README for
instructions). If you choose to use CVS, you’ll need to run ‘autoconf’ in
the gd/src directory to create the configure script. To build all of
Gwydion:

$ ./configure –prefix=/usr/local
$ make
$ make install

If binaries are not yet avilable for your platform, it will be necessary to
cross-compile and port d2c to the new architecture. This takes anywhere
from a few days to a week or two, and a working knowledge of Dylan. We’re
working on a porting guide, but for now, follow the instructions in the
README to subscribe to gd-hackers and announce your intent. New ports and
new binary packages are always welcome.

RELOCATING BINARIES

If you can’t install precompiled binaries into /usr/local, you can install
them elsewhere and set some appropriate environment variables. In general,
you’ll need to set PATH, any variables required by your C compiler
(although d2c tries to handle this automatically), and at least one
Dylan-specific variable.

DYLANDIR: The prefix under which Gwydion Dylan was installed. This defaults
to /usr/local for tarballs and /usr for RPMS. Both Mindy and d2c use this
variable to locate various files.
DYLANPATH: The location of d2c libraries and Mindy *.dbc files. This
defaults to “$DYLANDIR/lib/dylan”. You won’t normally need to set this
unless you create more than one directory of libraries.

The RPMS are allegedly relocatable. Tell us if it doesn’t work.