Unable to compile gerbil from a zip download, git needed by build

[kreely]

Hi, I think the instructions say that gerbil should build from a zip in the top level README.md, but the configure fails ....

❯ ./configure
fatal: Not a valid object name HEAD
fatal: 'origin' does not appear to be a git repository
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.
configuration failed

Could there please be a few more points about setting up compilation via zip file to satisfy git in the configuration?

[drewc]

Hey,

I think I see the confusion and will certainly modify the docs. Thanks for pointing it out!

The Build Instructions say "After unpacking a release or checking out the source code from Github". That unpack refers to our release tarball and not the auto-generated github source trees.

If you're downloading a .zip file of the source from github it will not compile and that is not recommended. Gambit Scheme is integrated in Gerbil as a git submodule and github does not include that in their zip files. We use a very specific commit of Gambit and thus downloading their source tree and placing it in the src/gambit directory will also, likely, not be sufficient.

But, you should be able to build from this tarball: https://github.com/mighty-gerbils/gerbil/releases/download/v0.18.1/gerbil-v0.18.1.tar.gz . We include the Gambit source tree in there.

Does that help? Let me know if there's anything else that is unclear, both in the docs and the build process itself, and we'll see what we can do.

Cheers!