THEORY The pre-installed guile interpreter can be used if has access to the proper shared libraries and scheme modules, which can be arranged by tweaking GUILE_LOAD_PATH and LTDL_LIBRARY_PATH env vars, respectively. GENERAL PRACTICE To invoke the guile interpreter before installing it (and its support files), call ${top_builddir_absolute}/pre-inst-guile where you would normally call guile. Similarly, for scripts/* (normally found by guile-tools), set env var GUILE to the above path when invoking the script. SPECIFIC PRACTICE Include the following line in any Makefile.am with rules that need to call the pre-installed guile interpreter: include $(top_srcdir)/am/pre-inst-guile This causes Automake to include a makefile fragment that defines two vars: `preinstguile' and `preinstguiletool'. The following examples show how these vars are used: display-sum5: $(preinstguile) -c '(display (+ 1 2 3 4 5))' display-deps-dotty: $(preinstguiletool)/use2dot *.scm Note the particular syntax of `preinstguiletool' usage. KNOWN USAGE check-guile.in doc/ref/Makefile.am libguile/Makefile.am ice-9/Makefile.am scripts/Makefile.am