Yeah you can still build scsh 0.7 (the new one) on Mac and Linux, using Scheme48 1.9.2.
Every attempt to do a "scsh in Scheme X" fails, because they're all "80% solutions"
Shivers himself explains the problem with 80% solutions in http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/papers/sre.txt
Quote:
There's a problem with tool design in the free software and academic
community. The tool designers are usually people who are building tools for
some larger goal. For example, let's take the case of someone who wants to do
web hacking in Scheme. His Scheme system doesn't have a sockets interface, so
he sits down and hacks one up for his particular Scheme implementation. Now,
socket API's are not what this programmer is interested in; he wants to get on
with things and hack the exciting stuff -- his real interest is Web services.
So he does a quick 80% job, which is adequate to get him up and running, and
then he's on to his orignal goal.
Unfortunately, his quickly-built socket interface isn't general. It just
covers the bits this particular hacker needed for his applications. So the
next guy that comes along and needs a socket interface can't use this one.
Not only does it lack coverage, but the deep structure wasn't thought out well
enough to allow for quality extension. So *he* does his *own* 80%
implementation. Five hackers later, five different, incompatible, ungeneral
implementations had been built. No one can use each others code.
The alternate way systems like this end up going over a cliff is that the
initial 80% system gets patched over and over again by subsequent hackers, and
what results is 80% bandaids and 20% structured code. When systems evolve
organically, it's unsuprising and unavoidable that what one ends up with is a
horrible design -- consider the DOS -> Win95 path.
As an alternative to five hackers doing five 80% solutions of the same
problem, we would be better off if each programmer picked a different task,
and really thought it through -- a 100% solution. Then each time a programmer
solved a problem, no one else would have to redo the effort. Of course, it's
true that 100% solutions are significantly harder to design and build than 80%
solutions. But they have one tremendous labor-savings advantage: you don't
have to constantly reinvent the wheel. The up-front investment buys you
forward progress; you aren't trapped endlessly reinventing the same awkward
wheel.