RE: [Axiom-developer] Re: Axiom trunk failure

[C Y]

--- "Page, Bill" <address@hidden> wrote:

> I think the developers of apt-get and yum might agree with
> you. ;) But I think most developers would prefer to take care
> of this themselves.
> 
> People who want to work with Axiom without these hassles
> should install the appropriate binary version.

I think autoconf will allow us to "have our cake and eat it too", so to
speak.  Maxima benefited tremendously from having a real
configure-make-install ability and I expect Axiom will be no different.
 Autoconf and friends are very, very useful in my experience - we are
able to automatically build a single Maxima install on three or more
different lisp implementations, and provide the user with a runtime
choice on which one they want to use :-).  So if they want the
friendlyness of Clisp or the speed of cmucl, they can make that choice
on a per-session basis.  I know this is impractical and maybe less
interesting for Axiom, but it is a useful illustration of what can be
done with autoconf.  I expect using either system libraries or falling
back to building included ones will be well within its abilities.  IIRC
BRL-CAD has some similar options, although I don't know that they
implement "try system libs first and then automatically fall back to
internal ones if failure" logic.

Cheers,
CY

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