[Axiom-developer] RE: patches and fixes

[Page, Bill]

On Friday, October 27, 2006 11:53 AM Gaby wrote:
>
> Tim Daly wrote writes:
> 
> [...]
> 
> | There are a large number of "fixes" being applied which appear
> | to have nothing to do with autotools, such as the sttaylor fix
> | and the sage change. Worse yet, it appears that the sage
> | connection won't work with gold so sage users cannot get the
> | latest axiom "gold" release.
> 
> Which "Sage connection" patch do you have in mind?
> 

I recently prepared a source package (spkg) for Sage that allows
Sage users to easily install Axiom by just doing

  $ sage -I axiom4sage-0.1.spkg

Sage supervises build Axiom from source - well actually it just
calls a script included in the spkg - but to sage users this
should "feel" very easy because they are used to doing the same
thing with several other optional Sage packages.

axiom4sage-0.1.spkg is built using the experimental build-
improvements Axiom source distribution because I wanted to test
it and to take advantage of the flexibility of the autoconf
tools to allow Axiom to be built on as wide a range of platforms
as possible. In my opinion trying to do this with the current
Axiom "Gold" would have been too unpredictable on previously
untested machines. Anyway, it's alse a matter of release-often-
release-early ... Sage itself is currently in a very rapid state
of growth, so I don't think most Sage users are too worried
about using possibly unstable (experimental) software. Also
they are likely to be quite helpful in reporting bugs.

I consider Axiom Gold to be a more "conservative" alternative
and not of as much interest to (most) developers. Of course we
need to define appropriately what we mean by "developer"? :-)

Regards,
Bill Page.