Re: [Axiom-developer] sourceforge/silver

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

root <address@hidden> writes:

| > For me personally, autoconf support is more important than
| > almost everything else, the reason being that I would really
| > like to see more Axiom developers. The more standard our build
| > environment is, the easier that will be. Seconly increasing
| > the number of type of supported platforms is very important
| > for increasing the number of Axiom users.
| > 
| > So I am especially interested in what I labelled Gold (52)
| > above, but I can live with the experimental branch until
| > then.
| 
| I realize that autoconf is your golden standard and you know I believe
| that it won't have a measureable effect on the number of developers.

I don't know.  

What I know for sure is that I have five students who all have hard
time with Axiom silver and I had to give them
axiom.build-improvements.  One group is working on formal power series,
and the other is working on algorithmic differentiation.

| I do think the build-improvements branch has a positive effect by
| making people believe they can change the system. Unfortunately
| changing Axiom is easy but showing that you didn't break anything is
| hard.  A lot of my changes are not posted because there are many
| things to check.  Though I have a lot of experience with Axiom I
| cannot answer Gaby's questions without study and experiment. I don't
| think autoconf is going to change that.

It most certainly is not going to answer those questions, but I believe it
would lower the entry barrier to building Axiom (and possibly
modifying it).  And that is a Good Thing. 

-- Gaby