Using Source Registries

Note

When using the dylan tool source registries are created for you via the dylan update command and you should not have to create them explicitly. You may want to skip this section for now.

Passing the name of a “.lid” file to dylan-compiler works great when you have a single library that only uses other libraries that are part of Open Dylan, but what if you want to use a second library that you wrote yourself or that you installed from GitHub? How will dylan-compiler find the sources for that library? The answer is registries. For each Dylan library that isn’t part of Open Dylan itself, you create a file in the registry that points to the “.lid” file for the library. For example, here’s the registry file for hello-world, created in the previous section. Note that this assumes you are still in the directory created by dylan new application:

$ cat ./registry/{platform}/hello-world   # substitute your platform
abstract://dylan/hello-world.lid

What’s going on here? First of all, the registry mechanism makes it possible to have platform-specific libraries. Anything platform-independent goes in the registry/generic directory. Other supported platform names are x86_64-freebsd, x86_64-linux, x86-win32, etc. For a full list see the Open Dylan registry.

Platform-specific registry directories are searched before registry/generic, so if you have a library that includes an extra file for Windows-only definitions, you can use two registry entries: one in the “x86-win32” directory and one in the “generic” directory.

Now let’s look at the actual content of our hello-world registry file:

abstract://dylan/hello-world.lid

What this is doing is locating a file relative to the directory containing the registry directory itself. If the registry directory is /home/you/xyz/registry then abstract://dylan/hello-world.lid says the hello-world “.lid” file is in /home/you/xyz/hello-world.lid. “abstract://dylan/” is just boilerplate.

When you invoke dylan-compiler in the directory containing the “registry” directory it automatically uses that registry, in addition to (and taking precedence over) the registry in the Open Dylan installation directory.

If you prefer to invoke the compiler from elsewhere, you can set the OPEN_DYLAN_USER_REGISTRIES environment variable to point your registry directory. For example:

$ export OPEN_DYLAN_USER_REGISTRIES=/home/you/xyz/registry

Once you’ve set OPEN_DYLAN_USER_REGISTRIES to your new registry, dylan-compiler can find the hello-world library source no matter what directory you’re currently working in. You only need to specify the library name:

$ cd /tmp
$ dylan-compiler -build hello-world

You can add more than one registry to OPEN_DYLAN_USER_REGISTRIES by separating them with colons (Unix) or semicolons (Windows):

$ export OPEN_DYLAN_USER_REGISTRIES=/my/registry:/their/registry

Note

If OPEN_DYLAN_USER_REGISTRIES is set, the “registry” directory in the current working directory is ignored.