RE: [Axiom-developer] Release?

[Mike Thomas]

Hi Bill/Tim.

| It will fail unless you first merge the files sent to you by
| Mike Thomas last week. I have not yet suceeded in merging these
| properly into axiom--windows--1 myself. Let me know if you get
| this to work. Otherwise we will need Mike's assistance.

Just a quick note to say that I'm badly bound up time wise for the coming
week and have little hope of sorting out arch or anything else over that
period.  Perhaps it would be better if I just zipped up my local stable
build and uploaded it so that you can merge the code changes into the
Windows arch branch as and when you are able.  Let me know if you would like
that.

Regarding cat, cd etc; even if you use the respective DOS commands, those
commands will still choke on the forward slash canonical path format used by
Windows GCL.  Sure, you can knock the paths into shape before calling
system() but that still (apart from being a hassle) leaves you open to the
other problems I have previously mentioned.  For this reason I recommend
either doing those commands in Lisp as suggested by Camm last week or as a
second best/temporary fix - cfuns-c.  I believe that si::chdir is the GCL
directory setting Lisp equivalent.  I have so far only addressed mkdir via
cfuns-c if my memory serves, but I believe that the best solution would be
to add ensure-directory-exists to the stable build of GCL.

I would personally urge you to seriously consider solving those system()
related issues before doing an advertised public release.  They aren't major
problems to solve and could have a fairly large negative impact on user
expectations if left untended.

Finally, thanks for the enormous effort you have put into the new installer.

More next week,

Mike Thomas