On February 21, 2006 2:54 AM David Mentre wrote: > ... > I think a hand-written ./configure is the way to go, contrary > to Bill's idea of using autoconf. I'll make my own proposal > and then the Axiom Community will decide.
Actually, the subject came up most recently in reply to Gaby, so I think I would prefer to call it "Gaby's idea" :) I am not against the use of a hand-written ./configure although this is exactly what we are already using. So in this case your proposal amounts to making (possibly major) improvements to the approach that we are already using. The autoconf tools, however provide lot of standardized and often tested ways to properly detect the environment. These same tools can even be used on Windows. I think that it would be a pity to have to re-invent all of this just to make the installation of Axiom more flexible and less error prone. The main complication is that the Axiom source distribution consists (almost) exclusively of pamphlet files. Before these can be processed by any other utility, they must first be processed with noweb tangle to extract the relevant parts. I think this means that any ./configure has to have at least some initial part that depends on a handwritten script. > > And I should underline that I believe more in consensus than > everything else. So the final build system will probably be a > mix between Bill's ideas, mines and yours. :-) > I am also not that against using something like ASDF for the lisp parts of Axiom. But I am strongly against twisting the rest of Axiom to make it fit into this tool. It seems to me that the configuration of the lisp part of Axiom is much less of a problem than the other parts - most of which are in "C" anyway. And GCL already uses autoconf to configure the build of lisp that is embedded in the standard (non-Debian) Axiom distribution. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
