Re: [Axiom-developer] axiom opportunity

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

"David MENTRE" <address@hidden> writes:

| Gaby,
| 
| 26 Apr 2006 18:06:33 +0200, Gabriel Dos Reis <address@hidden>:
| > Because I don't want to package it just for SuSE -- I might switch to or
| > acquire a new Unix variant in the future.  Furthermore, I consider
| > that approach a rathole[1]: which version of SuSE?  I certanly don't have
| > a standard SuSE installation and my working version is probably too
| > old by many standards.
| 
| The SuSE package (or RedHat or whatever) won't appear by chance.

Wasn't that obvious? :-)
However, it is possible to talk the packaging people into doing half
of the work when most of all they need is already there (i.e. provided
by us).

| Packaging a software is a lot of *work*. If you don't do it, nobody
| will do it for you. Don't forget this is Free Software.

that might not be obvious, but yes, I have an idea and practice of
free software -- it is not just do it by yoruself or talk other people
into doing it for you.  *In practice*, it is something in between.  
For example, I don't package GCC; I just build the release tarball;
someone else package it because the necessary bits are already there.

I'm not saying you should not try to SuSE/Red Hat package.  I'm saying 

| > I want to have Axiom in a form where I could
| > just type "./configure; make; make install" and be done with it.  See the
| > Autoconf suggestion in a different thread.
| 
| See the guy who said that he would provide a first a configure.ac. ;-)
| 
| >  But I would
| > like Axiom to be better than that; that is the reason why I talked to
| > Benjamin Kosnik about distribution when we met two-three weeks ago.  See the
| > "cross compilation issue" in another thread.
| 
| RedHat *requires* cross-compilation capabilities. I'm not sure Axiom
| is able to do that.

The issue not whether Axiom can do that it its current form -- last
time, I tried, it can't.  But, whether it can be made to do that.

| > I also briefly discussed
| > the issue with Paolo Carlini,  fellow libstdc++ maintainer, working
| > for SUSE.
| 
| So?

so, the executive summary is like for Red Hat.

| > [1] I had had a version of Maple working well till two years ago I
| > upgraded to a newer linux version that was using a new version of
| > glibc.  My copy of Maple stopped working.
| 
| Yes. This the reason that we are all working on Free Software and not
| proprietary one. But this has nothing to do with packaging issues.

It does: the root issue is *dependency*.  It has little to do with
proprietary versus non-propriatry.

-- Gaby