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Re: [Axiom-developer] Minor bugs


From: root
Subject: Re: [Axiom-developer] Minor bugs
Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 15:17:28 -0500

Bill,

>Now what about checking the results of negfloats.input?
>Where do I look? Provided I like the output, how do I make
>it part of the regression suite? How can I easily tell if the
>new .input file "passes"?
>
>If you could spend a bit of time completing and correcting this
>recipe for me, I will put it on a web page somewhere for easy
>reference.

The regression test process has not yet been recovered.
I'll document it when I do recover it. Like everything
else it "should" be working now but it all takes time.
You've followed the pattern so your input file will be
picked up in the regression process when it works.

The regression testing is done by hand for the moment.


><soapbox>
>BTW, all of this stuff seems so excrutiatingly low-level to
>me and SO EASY to break one way or another
>
> <b>like most of the Axiom build process --  !!</b>
>
><sigh />

Yes, but trivial to fix because it's just a missing character or two.
The reliability of a process is a ratio of the mean-time-to-failure
and the mean-time-to-repair. The build process is easily broken but
trivial to fix, thus higly reliable. Note that I've included explicit
debugging information (those pesky unique echo line numbers) so the
location of a mistake is painfully obvious and so is the fix.

>I am becoming used to the idea of automated tools that make
>this "messing around with picky details" less unnecessary.
>Documentation is of course is still important but when it is
>at such a low level and burdened with many details, just the
>"on ramp" to the learning curve becomes very high even if the
>process itself is quite simple.

If you have to work "thru a tool" and there is a bug in the tool you
can spend hours (a) deciding it's a tool bug and (b) fixing the tool.
Just look at the struggles of line-breaking and texmacs.

Axiom is a finely tuned, high performance, very large machine.
I'm working to include every bit of knowledge about the build
process into the makefiles so (a) it works, (b) it's automated
and (c) it's documented.

The makefiles are not hard as evidenced by the fact that i gave you 
NO instructions on how to make the changes and you did everything
correctly. The makefiles are tedious, I'll give you that.

>I find I spend an enormous amount of time just correctly
>stupid simple silly mistakes like the use of a space some
>place in a Makefile rather than a tab. Using "stupid tools"
>always makes me feel stupid...
>
>Since a lot of the "pickiness" is just in the use of the
>noweb/pamphlet low-level literature programming stuff, we
>could for example (if we had infinite time and resources :),
>invest in a more high-level literate programming tool such
>as Leo.
>

[.....SNIP.....]

I downloaded and used Leo when I started this process but
Leo does not really understand the pamphlet structure and
Leo isn't emacs. Editors are like wives; you only get one,
you learn its quirks, you learn to love its features and
flaws, it is very costly to switch, your new editor 
hates it when you use expressions from the previous editor,
and you can get in deep trouble asking the new editor to
do what the old editor used to do. I'm married to emacs.

Leo was not effective for me. If you can use it without
breaking the pamphlet structure it should be transparent
to everyone else.

In the fullness of time I'm hoping that your mathaction
site (and the doyen local version of it) understands the
pamphlet file structure and we can use it directly to 
maintain the sources.

>At the very least I think we need to spend more time
>structuring the whole build process in a simpler way (i.e.
>make more use of the advanced features of gnu make). I think
>the whole thing from start to finish could be MUCH simpler
>and the Makefiles much smaller. But then, what we have now
>works (at least for those who designed it ... :) so of course
>the incentive is not so great to change it. Still it seems
>to me to be a significant barrier to greater participation
>by other developers.
></soapbox>

Ummm, your definition of 'simpler' is different from mine.
Using "advanced" features in gmake is NOT making it 'simpler'.
Up until the introduction of $(shell..) the makefiles were
"vanilla" and did not depend on any version of make. The
size of the makefile is not a measure of complexity as you'll
discover that there is a simple, repetitive pattern used in every
makefile.

My other open source project (magnus) used a makefile scheme
that used every feature of gnu-make. In fact, it used the gcc
compiler with the -MM switch to automatically generate the
stanzas and dynamically load and evaluate the make dependencies.
It was 'simple' in some sense but it took several days to decode
how it worked because everything about the makefile was dynamic.
unless you understood the gcc -MM switch, dynamic stanza loading,
filename completion rules, and were a gnu-make wizard it was 
unreadable and unmaintainable. 

My makefiles are 'dumb' by design. Keep it dirt simple.  For every
file there is a stanza.  The makefile structure follows the directory
structure.  You don't even need to guess which makefile to modify as
the makefile is always in the current directory.

Each directory has a makefile which has 2 responsibilities:
(a) 'make' all subdirectories and (b) build its piece of
the final build. it's a tree rooted at the top level.

And within each makefile there is a stanza for each final file in the
build that gets made. No implicit rules are used.  Every stanza is
uniquely tagged by number and a comment of intention.  The makefiles
follow the "pull" model. that is,

  final file in mnt   DEPENDS-ON file in obj    (the sys dep files)

  file in obj         DEPENDS-ON file in int    (the sys indep files)

  file in int         DEPENDS-ON pamphlet file in src

  doc file in mnt/doc DEPENDS-ON pamphlet file in src

I've previously explained the reasoning behind the src/int/obj/mnt
structure. make (and gmake and configure) are based on the C 
programmers world-view. They are not really capable of cleanly
handling cross-directory dependencies although they can be
coerced into it. 

In the fullness of time I'd like the whole system to be in
common lisp. At that point i believe we should rewrite the
build machinery so it uses 'asdf' or 'mk:defsystem' which
follow the lisp worldview.

t







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