[Attempto] Installation bugs...?

[Kaarel Kaljurand]

Hi Vijay,

and thank you for the comments. There have been some fixes since the
release of v6.7-131003, see
https://github.com/Attempto/APE/commits/master. One of them fixed
commandline argument parsing in case of newer versions of SWI-Prolog.
Could you try with the latest GitHub version, i.e. download APE using:

    git clone https://github.com/Attempto/APE.git

Also, which version of SWI-Prolog are you using? APE should work with
all recent ones, but we haven't done much testing with v7.

See below for answers to your findings.

On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 12:57 PM, Vijay Saraswat <vijay at saraswat.org> wrote:
> Greetings --
>
> Just installed APE6.7-131003 on a Mac OS X 10.8.5 laptop, and am running
> examples, but took me a while, so I thought I would let you know the
> problems I faced.
>
> (1) README.md says:
>
> In order to compile and run APE, you first need to install a recent version
> of SWI-Prolog.
> SWI-Prolog is free software and can be downloaded from
> <http://www.swi-prolog.org>. Note that you
> minimally need to install the following SWI Prolog packages: `clib`, `sgml`,
> and `http`. To view
> the documentation embedded in the source files you also need `pldoc`.
>
> However, in the latest version of SWI-Prolog it seems that clib, sgml and
> http are already loaded. In fact they are not even listed in the list of
> packages on the SWI-Prolog website.

I think they are, see:

http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/doc_for?object=packages

(The SWI-Prolog website is currently undergoing updates, hopefully
this link remains working.)

It's true though that often there is no extra effort needed to get the
packages installed. E.g. the Debian and Windows packages for
SWI-Prolog contain all the SWI packages. If you install from source
then you can exclude some packages (by e.g.: export DISABLE_PKGS="jpl
ssl odbc utf8proc"), but by default everything is installed.

APE's README just lists all the packages that are necessary for APE.
You can disable the rest, e.g. the support for the SWI graphical
interface is not needed.

> (2) README.md says:
>
> Then type `ape.exe` in the case of Windows or
> `./ape.exe` otherwise. As a result, you should see the following output:
>
> Not true. On my machine i get nothing output (see the shell command prompt).
> ./ape.exe -version produces the desired output.
>
> (3) The -text command line option does not work. I get
>
>  ./ape.exe -text 'John walks.'
> ERROR: Illegal argument: arglist_namevaluelist/2: John walks.
> bash-3.2$ ./ape.exe -text "John walks."
> ERROR: Illegal argument: arglist_namevaluelist/2: John walks.

This should be fixed in the latest commit. We will release this fixed
version at some point soon as well.

Best,
Kaarel