Re: [Axiom-developer] First (quick & dirty) port of Axiom to gcl-2.5.2 and powerpc architecture

[root]

While we're on the subject of possible changes there are a few decisions
that I'm unhappy about and could use some ideas/suggestions....


(A) NOWEB.STY

Currently each pamphlet file names the path to the noweb.sty file.
This is bad. How can we fix this?

(B) SHELL COMMANDS IN MAKEFILES

You should be able to override the SPD variable on the make line with

make SPD=/home/david/pub

Currently the top level Makefile.pamphlet names the location of the
installation and the kind of system to be built. This information 
used to be derived from the $AXIOM variable (which is why it exists
at all). The AXIOM variable was designed to carry two pieces of
information which could be parsed out by the make: (1) the location
of the build and (2) the system to be built.

Generally the location of the build is the same as `pwd`. I've tried
(within the makefile) using 

SPD=`pwd`

but that fails. It used to work years ago but make has changed.
I also used to set the kind of system to build using:

SYS=`basename $AXIOM`

which would result in a way to build other kinds of systems (e.g. if
AXIOM=/spad/bin/power-pc it would generate Makefile-power-pc and
build a power-pc system). This also doesn't work.

The primary failure is that I don't understand a way to get make to
execute shell commands. I tried ($shell basename $AXIOM) but that
also fails. 

Note that the AXIOM variable is used at runtime to find the libraries
so we can't just truncate it to "linux" or "power-pc". We could, of
course, define two variables rather than one.

(C) FILE FORMATS 
Pamphlet files go to dvi files. That's sort of ok as dvi files work
everywhere. However, we need to plan in the long term and think about
a way to automatically organize the information in pamphlet files.
I've been thinking about creating a meta-pamphlet file in each
directory (possibly automatically created by make) from <<meta>>=
tags in the pamphlet files. This would allow pamphlet file writers
to specify how the available information should be used. So the
make walks across all of the pamphlet files, extracts <<meta>> 
chunks, munches them into some organized form, creates a latex 
table of contents, and generates a new dvi file.

Several issues arise including things like the fact that dvi files
don't support hyperlinks so some sort of a viewer needs to exist.
Ideally this would be some standard viewer as we'd have less code
to maintain. 

Ultimately we need to think out how the pamphlet, booklet, and 
other documentation/usage/FAQ/maint information is going to be
structured and viewed.

Suggestions?

Tim
address@hidden
address@hidden