Re: [Axiom-developer] noweb tarball

[Waldek Hebisch]

Bill Page wrote:
> On April 27, 2007 8:52 AM Waldek Hebisch wrote:
> > 
> > Let me restate my position: in general I am against putting
> > souces of prerequisities (especially as tarballs, but
> > unpacked form is also bad) in Axiom svn repositiry.  Of
> > course, sometimes we want to make an exception but I do not
> > see any reason in case of noweb.  But this does not exclude
> > having helper code which make use of prerequisities easier.
> > 
> 
> In principle I agree with this, however where should this
> "helper code" look for the tarball? And what name?
> 
> Your revision 517 uses:
> 
> +       $(TAR) -zxf $(axiom_optional_srcdir)/noweb-2.10a.tgz && \
> 
> ...
> 
> +                yes) if test -f $axiom_top_srcdir/zips/noweb-2.10a.tgz ;
> then
> +                         axiom_build_noweb=yes
> +                     else
> +                         { { echo "$as_me:$LINENO: error:
> --with-included-noweb specified, but no noweb sources is present" >&5
> +echo "$as_me: error: --with-included-noweb specified, but no noweb sources
> is present" >&2;}
> +   { (exit 1); exit 1; }; }
> 
> and we have:
> 
> I suppose it is better to write:
> 
> +                yes) if test -f $axiom_optional_srcdir/noweb-2.10a.tgz ;
> then
> 
> In config/var-def.mk we have:
> 
>   axiom_optional_srcdir = $(abs_top_srcdir)/zips
>

ATM axiom_optional_srcdir is not available in configure, so we would
have to set it in configure and propagate to config/var-def.mk
 
> "with-included-noweb" implies to me that it is included, but
> you expect someone to copy 'noweb-2.10a.tgz' into the Axiom
> source distribution which seems awkward to me. Of course
> there is no "standard" place to look for such source files
> on Linux, but varies from one Linux distribution to the next
> and apparently from one project to the next.
> 
> Also, note the 'noweb-2.10a.tgz' is not the current version
> of noweb. See:
> 
> http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nr/noweb/dist
> 
> I suppose that these problems might be solved by an appropriate
> configure parameter, e.g.
> 
>   --with-noweb-src=/home/bpage/noweb-2.11b.tgz
> 
> But should we be concerned about supporting different releases
> of noweb if Norman Ramsey should decide to slightly change
> the method of building noweb with a new release?
>

My intention is that somebody can collect Axiom and its prerequisities
and make a source distribution which should be easy to build on
large set of platforms.  Maker of such distribution can use
different noweb version with different name: changing name is
trivial (while hooking noweb build to Axiom is not so trivial).

-- 
                              Waldek Hebisch
address@hidden