Re: [Axiom-developer] Axiom silver branch

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

Hello,

  I'm sorry to hear people have had trouble checking out the SVN tree.
When I ried check out, it was from a hotel where the connection was
very poor but I did not have problems checking out several copy and
variants of the source tree.
I'm still not in a place where I can do much right now.  But, I'm
collecting all the suggestions here.

"Bill Page" <address@hidden> writes:

| On April 8, 2006 5:47 PM Frederic Lehobey wrote:
| > ... 
| > On Sat, Apr 08, 2006 at 05:25:08PM -0400, Bill Page wrote:
| > > Storing binary files in a source code archive is something that
| > > I have always objected to, but Tim insists on re-distributing
| > > code this way. I really think we should stop doing this.
| > 
| > Please, provide the relevant patches. This is exactly what needs
| > the silver branch and what it is intended for.  :-)
| > 
| 
| Indeed. But these two patches will introduce two new dependencies:
| both gcl and noweb would have to be installed *before* building
| Axiom. Personally, I don't think that this is a problem. Tim Daly
| resists. Are there any other opinions?

I believe we should keep noweb.

For GCL, I see two paths:

  (1) keep it in the source tree, but do not build it automatically:
  (2) go with Bill's suggestion and ditch it completely from the
      source tree.

My preference would be (1), but I can be persuaded to do (2) if we
can't make (1) work.

By (1), I mean
   (a) if configure dectects that there is a "reasonable" GCL
       installed, we do not need to build our own version. Or,

   (b) continue doing we're already doing today.

| The first patch is really most of Camm Maquire's patch to build
| Axiom on Debian without re-compiling gcl. On Debian gcl is a
| build dependency, just like gcc.

Not all linux distro come with a pre-installed GCL; I would like we
work for broader linxu distros as much as possible.  I would like to
see us in a position when we have a build machinery that makes it
possible to Axiomn with virtually all linux flavours -- not just debian.
I believe Axiom will gain a lot by doing that.

| The second patch was suggested by Norman Ramsey (author of noweb)
| a couple of years ago. It provides a simple awk script to allow
| noweb to be used with Axiom pamphlet files without modifications
| to noweb.
| 
| Together these two patches eliminate the need to build noweb and
| gcl as part of the Axiom build and thus eliminate the need for
| the corresponding .tgz files in the source code archive.

That is interesting.  Do you have links to those patches so that we
can see how we could/should consider them and work out the details
with Tim?

-- Gaby