RE: [Axiom-developer] Re: Guessing package, was: Re: your program / paper

[Bill Page]

On March 20, 2007 12:33 PM Alfredo Portes wrote:
> 
> > Bill Page wrote: 
> > | From my point of view, the creation of a new "Silver" trunk
> > | is a little overdue.
> >
> Gaby wrote:
> > We need an "upgraded" silver branch for sure.  However, we do
> > have severe communication problems.
> >
> > Let's upgrade build-improvements with backports from wh-sandbox.
> 
> But why not back porting quick fixes to Silver trunk directly 
> from wh-sandbox? Isnt that the purpose of Silver trunk to be
> experimental and represent the latest and greatest from Axiom?

Actually as I understand it Silver is supposed to be the
"release candidate" for Axiom Gold. But as Gaby stated in such
an eloquent circumlocution: "We seem to have communications
problems." The procedure as set out by Tim Daly is not really
working and it seems that he is continuing on his own to
manually incorporate some of the changes now in the build-
improvements and wh-sandbox branches, effectively bypassing
the "Silver" stage. This might result in a new "Gold" but
it's pedigree will still be rather uncertain.

> I think that Martin package and other quick patches should
> have been added to silver trunk directly and not to the
> branches.
> 

wh-sandbox has implemented a radically different algebra build
process that avoids many of the problems associated with the
old "bootstrap" method. It has also implemented some significant
improvements to the way the Axiom database is built. Therefore
it is not clear to me if it would be possible to incorporate
Martin's package in the old Silver release without first
incorporating most (if not all) of the changes in wh-sandbox.
Silver is essentially just the old patch-50 from the tla
archives. You will recall the problems that we had last summer
trying to get Martin's code built on that system.

One could proceed by backporting all (or most) of the revisions
from the build-improvements branch and the wh-sandbox sub-
branch, but that would certainly be a lot of work! I think the
state of the current /silver branch (almost the same as /trunk)
on SourceForge is too distant from both build-improvements and
wh-sandbox branches to continue to serve as the base. It would
much better just to re-define it as something very close to the
current wh-sandbox (or build-improvements with wh-sandbox
backports).

Regards,
Bill Page.