[Axiom-developer] directory/truename transition

[daly]

Ondrej,

> Yes, but generally it is a good philosophy to let each particular
> distribution to handle all external programs (be it Debian, Ubuntu,
> Gentoo, Suse or Mac OS X). Because otherwise axiom is just duplicating
> the job that the distribution should do.

This has been debated extensively on this list and there are other 
people here who agree with you, most notably Bill Page, which is why
he asked the question. This view implicitly assumes that users have
tools like apt-get and yum which can resolve dependencies. At least
one of my systems is still RedHat 9 and all dependencies in rpm files
have to be searched and resolved by hand, a daunting task at best.

Consider the current case, that there are several fixes in GCL that
Axiom uses but they are still in GCL-2.6.8pre. In fact, there are
different, unmarked versions of GCL-2.6.8pre which contain additional
fixes.

If a user gets a copy of Axiom and tries to build it they would be
immediately confronted with the task of installing GCL. They would
naturally install GCL-2.6.7 since that is the released version. They
would then find that the Axiom build would fail, either because
    (a) it had the bug that GCL-2.6.8pre (some snapshot) fixes
or  (b) axiom needed GCL-2.6.8pre to build, not GCL-2.6.7

Reporting the bug (a) would get the reply "that's been fixed".
Reporting the bug (b) would get the reply "get the CVS GCL".

In either case the potential Axiom user is confronted with a
non-working Axiom system. Thus we lose a potential Axiom user.

My philosophy is that Axiom should "just work". From this it 
follows that we need to extensively test Axiom on a single
known-good version of GCL, which we cache. That way the end
user gets Axiom, sets a shell variable, and types 'make'.
People who want a specific GCL can specify that on the make:
   make GCLVERSION=gcl-2.6.7

If you've followed the recent discussion there have been some
excellent advances in the "just work" department, most notably
Gaby's Build Improvements change for autoconf.

There is also some effort to use an external GCL but there have
been issues related to dynamic linking and Axiom-specific 
modifications which Gold statically links. All of these will
eventually be worked out.

In the mean time it seems to me that the struggles which concern
developers on internal builds and branches should not become
concerns of external users. Axiom should "just work".

As noted, however, there is much disagreement about the means,
if not the goal, of "just works".

Tim