Re: [Axiom-developer] Old Lisp

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

"Bill Page" <address@hidden> writes:

| On August 12, 2006 8:56 PM Gaby wrote:
| > ... 
| > There are still some patches against GCL that Tim developed.
| > Ideally, I think we should not be in the business of patching
| > GCL. Camm has been collaborating with us very effectively; we
| > should communicate those issues with him and see how they can
| > be addressed in GCL upstream.
| > 
| 
| I think all of the patches made by Tim are obsolete. I agree
| that we should not be in the business of patching GCL. Although
| GCL is currently the primary vehicle for delivering Axiom, it
| is not the only Lisp that is capable of doing so. (For example
| there is the open source CMUCL version of Axiom done by Jurgen
| Weiss and the commercial version of Axiom used yet another lisp
| and that lisp is now open source too.

OK.

| In fact I am fairly sure that Camm has already addressed all of
| the GCL issues that have been identified so far. None of these
| patches are used in the Debian release of Axiom which is built
| from an unmodified standard distribution of GCL. There is no
| reason that I can think of way this should not become the standard
| way of building Axiom from GCL on all platforms (including Windows).

For GCL-2.6.7, Tim has a patch against configure.in.  The reason being
that:

   There is a typo in configure.in that is only detected under some
   versions of bash. The problem is a missing single-quote mark.

For that to work correctly, there is an implicit assumption that the
user's build environment has Autoconf -- to regenerate configure from
the patched configure.in.  I don't how serious that is.  Anyway, it
GCL-2.6.7 that we might just abandon from the silver branch.

For GCL-2.6.8pre we have four patches:

  * gcl-2.6.8pre.socket.patch
  * gcl-2.6.8pre.libspad.patch
  * gcl-2.6.8pre.toploop.patch
  * gcl-2.6.8pre.collectfn.fix

Can you check with Camm that they are indeed not needed anymore?  I'm
sorry, I don't fully understand the issues they are trying to address.

-- Gaby