Re: [Axiom-developer] Turtles all the way down.

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

Humberto Ortiz-Zuazaga <address@hidden> writes:

| Axiom's a pretty complex system, and it seems to have picked up a bunch
| of other projects like clef, noweb, and gcl, and like all good lisp
| systems,  even recursive project dependencies like gcl has it's own bfd,
| and gmp.
| 
| There is still a set of external dependencies that have to be satisfied,
| like pdflatex, gcc, and others.
| 
| The recent clef/readline thread points out it may be advantageous to
| review the list of internal and external dependencies, and prune some code.
| 
| What are people thinking about the builds of axiom?

The current build machinery is needlessly too complex, flawed, and
would gain in reducing the number of things it currently duplicates.

| Debian tries to
| patch axiom to use system supplied tools and libraries where possible,
| the Mac OS X port tries to use local copies of everything.

:-(

| build-improvements stated goals are to automagically pick up any
| installed copies and build the rest internally.
| 
| I ask because I had to mangle ./configure to fix a test for
| malloc/malloc.h on Intel Mac. Neither of the autoconf programs installed
| on my Mac like the configure.in in gcl-2.6.8pre:
| 
| $ /sw/bin/autoconf --version
| autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.60
| 
| $ /usr/bin/autoconf --version
| autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.59

yes, that is annoying.  I tripped over that issue a couple of days ago. 
Mostly, it is a matter of GCL's configure.in being "under-quoted" --
it needs more quotes in several places, especially those with nested
macro invokations.  The world is at Autoconf 2.60; GCL's is stuck at
Autoconf 2.13.  I did not want to mess with it more than needed
especially on the gcl-2.6.8pre branch.  However, I definitely consider
a lifting for gcl-2.7.x.

| configure says it's been generated with autoconf 2.13.

yes.  

| I guess there's really no way to ship axiom with it's own autoconf if we

I do hope we don't go down that path.

| have any expectation of using configure to build axiom, but how far down
| do we plan to go? I saw Gaby is seriously considering integrating gcl
| and gcc.

The integration of GCL to GCC is not going to happen for GCC-4.3 (we
just entered the initial development phase for GCC-4.3).  It
probably is something like GCC-4.4.0 or GCC-4.5.0.

However, GCL's configure.in issue is easily solved though.  

What specifically did you want to do with malloc/malloc.h?

-- Gaby