Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: Request for wh-sandbox and build-improvements

[Waldek Hebisch]

Martin Rubey wrote:
> 2) and install *.spad.pamphlet instead of *.spad into
>    target/i686-pc-linux/src/algebra/
>  
>    That this didn't happen in the first place is *really* strange in my
>    opinion.
>

I suspect that even people advocating literate progammining do not
consider _unprocessed_ pamphlets as human readable (to say the truth
current Axiom sources contain many examples of using noweb for
obfuscation).  For pamphlets to enhance readability we will need
specialized editor/viewer (and considering our resouces I am not
sure if 25 years is enough to develop a good one).

> 3) apart of that, install the SPADEDIT script into target/i686-pc-linux/lib/
> 
>    I'll have to modify it a tiny little bit if you agree on (2).  In
>    particular, it may make sense to make it obey an environment variable, say,
>    AXIOMEDITOR, that contains the name of an editor to be called with two
>    arguments, namely line-number and filename.
> 
>    However, I believe that any script is better than no script, because many
>    people will not have write access to the target/i686-pc-linux/lib/
>    directory, so they cannot use the HyperDoc functionality.
> 
> 
> Well, I do not insist on (3). But (1) and (2) would be important to me.
> 

Hmm, 2 is easy to do.  But I wonder why you consider it important
(I personally do not care very much one way or another because I
typically have the whole build tree at hand).

Concering 3: you solve nicely part of the problem (that is finding
correct place in source files).  When I first saw you script I had
doubts because user may have quite different preferences for
editor/viewer and passing line numbers to editors can be quite
compicated (I am affraid that there are still editors with no
support for passing line numbers).  But now I think that the only
way to "solve" problem of correct way to invoke editor is
to make it user responsibility.  More precisely, I think that
user should have possibility to effectively replace SPADEDIT
by own program.  Of course, most user will benefit from finding
the correct place, so IMHO correct way is to provide in SPADEDIT
escape to user code.  Your AXIOMEDITOR variable (or maybe call it
SPADEDIT_ACTION) could do this if you pass to it just file name
and line number (as two separate arguments).  In such case we
probably should provide a few example editors -- that is
shell functions which call say emacs, vi, maybe kdvi.

-- 
                              Waldek Hebisch
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