PLA, kakopo, plumage, matrixy installation

[Jay Emerson]

I'm trying to hack around and decided to move on from Squaak to
matrixy, which of course requires PLA.  I'm running the new Parrot
2.4.0 in case that matters.  The following is somewhat out of
sequence, but...

1.) When trying to build PLA, I got an error about pmc not being
defined at line 284 of nummatrix2d.pmc; after staring at the code I
took a chance and changed this to SELF.  This at least got rid of the
error and PLA built and installed; I did not test (see below -- I did
try), and this was likely not the right fix, but there it is (I sent
this offlist to Whiteknight).

2.) Next, I got matrixy, but there was no setup.pir.  A message on
github indicated that perhaps setup.pir was needed from a contributor
(fperadd++?) to plumage (at least, this is my best guess).

3.) So, I got plumage, doing the following:

jay at jay-BEAST:~/src/parrot-plumage-parrot-plumage$ parrot-nqp Configure.nqp
Hello, I'm Configure. My job is to poke and prod
your system to figure out how to build Plumage.

compiler returned NULL ByteCode './src/lib/Plumage/NQPUtil.pir' - The
opcode 'substr_s_i_i_s' (substr<4>) was not found. Check the type and
number of the arguments
current instr.: 'MAIN' pc 99 (EVAL_1:0)


4.) Finally, I thought I'd get kakopo: although that didn't seem to be
a requirement for PLA, the README said it was needed for the testing
(due diligence... I did try).  There were no instructions on building,
but I went out on a limb:

jay at jay-BEAST:~/src/kakapo-kakapo$ parrot-nqp setup.nqp
<SNIP>
/usr/local/bin/parrot-nqp --target=pir
--output=src/Cuculinae/SigMatcher.pir  src/Cuculinae/SigMatcher.nqp
Illegal pod directive at line 25, near ":= Opcode:"
current instr.: 'parrot;HLL;Grammar;panic' pc 501
(ext/nqp-rx/src/stage0/HLL-s0.pir:327)
called from Sub 'parrot;NQP;Grammar;pod_comment' pc 3907
(ext/nqp-rx/src/stage0/NQP-s0.pir:1192)
<SNIP>

----

At this point, I've maxed out my "best guesses", and I didn't see
anything glaringly suspicious on that line 25.  I tend to think I've
done something silly and apologize if I missed something obvious that
was documented.  If more information is needed about my configuration,
etc... please let me know.  Ubuntu Linux, Parrot 2.4.0 downloaded
yesterday I think, with these other projects downloaded this AM.

Advice welcome, with many thanks,

Jay