Re: [ECL 26.5.5][bugfix release]

Dear all,

After several discussions,
on
https://gitlab.com/embeddable-common-lisp/ecl/-/work_items/846
on
https://github.com/sagemath/sage/issues/42148
and surveying the various solutions put forward in various
distribution channels (Linux distros, guix, etc)

I would like to publicly plead for ecl and libecl to allow to
configure  a default system-wide location for external .fas libraries,
akin to python's site-packages/,
which  REQUIRE would traverse in search for .fas files to load.
Maxima is the most prominent example of a system providing maxima.fas.

This location ought to be relative to the installation prefix (PREFIX,
as shown by ./configure)
This would alleviate the endless bikeshedding caused by its absence.

Best,
Dima

On Fri, May 8, 2026 at 2:19=E2=80=AFPM Daniel Kochma=C5=84ski <daniel@turtl=
eware.eu> wrote:
>
> Hey Dima,
>
> > On Fri, May 8, 2026 at 1:03=E2=80=AFPM Dima Pasechnik <dimpase+ecl@gmai=
l.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Thanks for this. Meanwhile, I'm trying (wearing my Sagemath developer=
 hat)
> > > to make a ecl-compiled, embeddable  Maxima package for Homebrew (the
> > > missing macOS package system), and I am hitting a snag in installing
> > > maxima.fas.
> > >
> > > Homebrew does not allow another package to intrude into the
> > > installation of another package, meaning
> > > I cannot copy maxima.fas to the usual location of .fas files, the one
> > > provided by the call
> > >
> > >   ecl -eval "(princ (SI:GET-LIBRARY-PATHNAME))" -eval "(quit)"
> > >
> > > (as done in Maxima-ecl packages in Sagemath and in Linux distros such=
 as Gentoo)
> >
> > cf. https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/22188
> >
> > >
> > > How does one tell ecl to look for .fas files in some other directory?
> > > Or are these locations hard-coded, and without changes to ecl it's no=
t possible?
> > >
>
> we have a mechanism to customize how REQUIRE looks for modules, I've adde=
d a ticket
> to document it in the manual (and answered in the linked github issue):
>
> https://gitlab.com/embeddable-common-lisp/ecl/-/work_items/846
>
> Long story short, push the search function to ext:*module-provider-functi=
ons*.
>
> Best regards,
> Daniel