Re: [Axiom-developer] [build-improvements] Requests for discussion

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

"Page, Bill" <address@hidden> writes:

| On Tuesday, August 01, 2006 10:12 PM Cliff Yapp wrote:
| > ...
| > I thought it would end up like this:
| > 
| > 1)  Have configure.ac and configure.ac.pamphlet both present 
| > in the top level directory.  configure.ac.pamphlet is where
| > editing is done, and when a commit is made (for this one file)
| > a configure.ac file is also committed
| > ...
| 
| I don't see why we need 'configure.ac'. Just 'configure' and
| configure.ac.pamphlet should be enough. No? 

Autoconf needs an input to generate configure, that ought to be
configure.ac.  You can imagine that the configure.ac exists only for
the purpose of generating configure, but things are not that simple
when one uses to other tools that depend on configure.ac.

[...]

| > I don't think we should fear a couple of non-pamphlet files 
| > being present in the top level directory - indeed, it will
| > simplify matters considerably from the user standpoint.
| 
| I agree. As a user I would like to see just the usual:
| 
|   ./configure
|   make
|   make test
|   make install
|   axiom
| 
| What happens inside I don't care (unless it fails).

Yes.


[...]

| I think Axiom developers can live with just a little more
| complication than that in order to handle the literate
| programming methodology. So they need to have noweb installed.
| This would certainly be the case anyway if they had already
| built Axiom successfully.

Not necessarily.  If I'm packaging axiom for a system, I'll not
necessarily have nowed installed, even after I built Axiom.

[...]

| To be nice to new developers we might want to provide
| 
|   make distribution

When we move (later) to Automake, we will have 

   make dist

which is standard, and offered by Automake for free.

-- Gaby