[Axiom-developer] Re: directory/truename transition

[Bill Page]

On 7/4/07, Tim Daly wrote:
> ...
> 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.

Both build-improvements and wh-sandbox allow these dependencies to be
satisfied by downloading the addtional gcl and/or noweb sources. If
they are present in the source tree, then local versions of these are
built and used in turn to build Axiom. In fact build-improvements
still includes a gcl directory containing a recent snapshot of
gcl-2.6.8pre which is only used if an externally installed gcl is not
present or if specifically requested by a configure option.

> 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.

I would think that in this case neither Axiom nor GCL are ready for an
official release.

> 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".

> From what Camm just wrote:

> At the moment, I'm using the Debian package version number
> and autobuilders to verify that gcl and all applications build atop
> the current toolchain.  I'm about to release 2.6.7-34, which is a
> current 2.6.8pre snapshot.

So it seems that Camm is currently treating 2.6.8pre as a sub-release
fix to 2.6.7. This would mean for Debian users that all they would
need to do is

 apt-get update axiom*

and they would have the necessary version of GCL required to build the
the Debian modified sources for Axiom as well as the wh-sandbox and
build-improvements branches.

Perhaps the official Axiom release should also use gcl-2.6.7-34
sources as released on Debian?

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

Indeed. I think that it is only practical to aim for "just works" in
the case of binary distributions tested and certified for specific
environments. Compiling Axiom from source is a completely different
issue in which "just works" is very often unlikely.

Regards,
Bill Page.