[m-users.] Some feedback on building mercury

[Volker Wysk]

Hi!

I've built mecury rotd-2019-01-03 from the sources, and I'd like to give some 
feedback.

First of all, it worked amazingly well and painless, for such a large, 
complicated project. 

It took some two and a half hours on my eight core processor and SSD. In the 
end, the installed thing took almost a gigabyte on my hard disk.

In the configure step, I had to figure out what extra packages are needed. In 
the end, I had to install these packages: mmake texinfo texlive lynx flex 
bison. I had to inspect the long configure output in order to find out which 
things are missing, and in what packages they can be found. This involved 
repeatedly doing "apt-file". I'm missing some list of the things, which are 
needed (or are optional) for installing mercury.

Then there was the "WARNING: Mercury compiler not yet installed". 

The "make install" step produced an enormous amount of messages. I'm not sure 
if I missed something important.

At the end, the PATH needed to be augmented, and the man pages and info files 
needed to be made available. I haven't used the MANPATH and INFOPATH 
environment variables, because they aren't used on my Kubuntu 18.04 system. 
Instead I symlinked to them the /usr/share/man/man1 and /usr/share/info 
directories, respectively.

Cheers
Volker