[Axiom-developer] Re: GCL on Cygwin for Axiom

[Bill Page]

On Wednesday, November 20, 2002 6:26 PM Mike Thomas
address@hidden wrote:

> ... 
> Below please find an attempt to discourage the development
> of a Cygwin version of GCL and in the interests of
> intellectual freedom, "paper napkin" instructions on
> how to go about it if you decide to do so.
> ...

Ok, I have no particularly strong reason to continue
with Cygwin. My current goal is to support the open
source version of Axiom with both Codemist CCL and GCL
on a Windows platform and I just considered Cygwin as
a logical "half-way" point.

On Wednesday, November 20, 2002 8:31 PM Camm Maguire
address@hidden wrote:

> ...
> On Debian systems, gcl/maxima and gcl/acl2 packages
> now exist which compile and pass all tests on all
> platforms, with the exception of a few remaining
> issues with acl2, which should be resolved shortly.
> Mike tells me that the latest Mingw GCL binary does
> likewise on Windows.  We hope to make axiom the third
> such example!
> ...

Since GCL can already be built on both Linux and Windows
(with mingw), the only problem is CCL. CCL should be
relatively easy to port, but my initial worry would
be the use of SUN rpc in CCL. I am quite sure there is
no port of this version of rpc to native Windows, is
there? I even had trouble finding one that works with
Cygwin.

A secondary issue is that the next goal after getting
OpenAxiom to run in Windows is to provide a new GUI
frontend (to replace Techexplorer). The current plan
is to use TeXmacs. Currently TeXmacs runs only on Linux
and Cygwin (with Xfree86). Making it work under native
Windows sounds formidable and I am not sure if anyone
is seriously attempting such a port. But I suppose there
is no reason (in principle) why one could not support
TeXmacs under Cygwin with access to the Windows native
version of Axiom. The main purpose of Cygwin then would
be to provide the x-server windows environment.

So, I am about to embark on setting up MinGW + MSYS on
my Windows system and see how far I can get with
the current Axiom build. Tim: I'll probably go for
the GCL 2.5 since that version is know to work and
modify the makefile.pamphlet files accordingly.

Regards,
Bill Page.