I have been busy trying to learn Chicken scheme recently. The issue is that by default the REPL is a bit barebone. You are supposed to “augment” it by injecting a library of your choosing, like readline.

The documentation for the project is quite good, even if a recent transition to a new major version has left some part of it out-of-date.

I tried to install breadline, which provides bindings to the readline library, but the build process failed because pkg-config cannot provide the compiler flags for readline:

~  $ sudo apt install pkg-config libreadline-dev
[...]
~  $ sudo chicken-install breadline                                         
building breadline                                                                                         
   /home/user/.cache/chicken-install/breadline/build-breadline [...]
Package readline was not found in the pkg-config search path.                              
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `readline.pc'                                                                            
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable                                                 
No package 'readline' found                                      

It seems that the flags definition is not provided by the packages on debian/ubuntu, even if it is generated during the compilation of the library itself.

I downloaded the source code used to build the package and generated a simple definition file in /usr/share/pkgconfig/readline.pc:

Name: Readline
Description: Gnu Readline library for command line editing
URL: http://tiswww.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html
Version: 7.0
Requires.private: tinfo
Libs: -lreadline
Cflags: -I/usr/include/readline

The command chicken-install worked fine this time.