RE: [Axiom-developer] noweb tarball

[Bill Page]

On April 27, 2007 8:52 AM Waldek Hebisch wrote:
> 
> > Waldek Hebisch writes:
> > 
> > | Revision: 517
> > |           http://svn.sourceforge.net/axiom/?rev=517&view=rev
> > | Author:   whebisch
> > | Date:     2007-04-26 03:56:16 -0700 (Thu, 26 Apr 2007)
> > | 
> > | Log Message:
> > | -----------
> > | Add back support for noweb tarball.
> > 
>
> Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
> > I reluctantly removed this, at the very insistance of
> > people here. I'm curious of what changed your mind.
> > 
> ...
> 
> Let me restate my position: in general I am against putting
> souces of prerequisities (especially as tarballs, but
> unpacked form is also bad) in Axiom svn repositiry.  Of
> course, sometimes we want to make an exception but I do not
> see any reason in case of noweb.  But this does not exclude
> having helper code which make use of prerequisities easier.
> 

In principle I agree with this, however where should this
"helper code" look for the tarball? And what name?

Your revision 517 uses:

+         $(TAR) -zxf $(axiom_optional_srcdir)/noweb-2.10a.tgz && \

...

+                yes) if test -f $axiom_top_srcdir/zips/noweb-2.10a.tgz ;
then
+                         axiom_build_noweb=yes
+                     else
+                         { { echo "$as_me:$LINENO: error:
--with-included-noweb specified, but no noweb sources is present" >&5
+echo "$as_me: error: --with-included-noweb specified, but no noweb sources
is present" >&2;}
+   { (exit 1); exit 1; }; }

and we have:

I suppose it is better to write:

+                yes) if test -f $axiom_optional_srcdir/noweb-2.10a.tgz ;
then

In config/var-def.mk we have:

  axiom_optional_srcdir = $(abs_top_srcdir)/zips

"with-included-noweb" implies to me that it is included, but
you expect someone to copy 'noweb-2.10a.tgz' into the Axiom
source distribution which seems awkward to me. Of course
there is no "standard" place to look for such source files
on Linux, but varies from one Linux distribution to the next
and apparently from one project to the next.

Also, note the 'noweb-2.10a.tgz' is not the current version
of noweb. See:

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nr/noweb/dist

I suppose that these problems might be solved by an appropriate
configure parameter, e.g.

  --with-noweb-src=/home/bpage/noweb-2.11b.tgz

But should we be concerned about supporting different releases
of noweb if Norman Ramsey should decide to slightly change
the method of building noweb with a new release?

So in spite of the "convenience" I do not like this very much.

I would very much prefer if we simply expect developers to
resolve build dependencies in the manner that is usual for
their platform, e.g. 'apt-get build-dep axiom' on Debian.

And of course this also applies to gcl.

Regards,
Bill Page.