[Axiom-developer] Turtles all the way down.

[Humberto Ortiz-Zuazaga]

Axiom's a pretty complex system, and it seems to have picked up a bunch
of other projects like clef, noweb, and gcl, and like all good lisp
systems,  even recursive project dependencies like gcl has it's own bfd,
and gmp.

There is still a set of external dependencies that have to be satisfied,
like pdflatex, gcc, and others.

The recent clef/readline thread points out it may be advantageous to
review the list of internal and external dependencies, and prune some code.

What are people thinking about the builds of axiom? Debian tries to
patch axiom to use system supplied tools and libraries where possible,
the Mac OS X port tries to use local copies of everything.
build-improvements stated goals are to automagically pick up any
installed copies and build the rest internally.

I ask because I had to mangle ./configure to fix a test for
malloc/malloc.h on Intel Mac. Neither of the autoconf programs installed
on my Mac like the configure.in in gcl-2.6.8pre:

$ /sw/bin/autoconf --version
autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.60

$ /usr/bin/autoconf --version
autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.59

configure says it's been generated with autoconf 2.13.

I guess there's really no way to ship axiom with it's own autoconf if we
have any expectation of using configure to build axiom, but how far down
do we plan to go? I saw Gaby is seriously considering integrating gcl
and gcc.


-- 
Humberto Ortiz-Zuazaga
Programmer-Archaeologist
University of Puerto Rico
http://www.hpcf.upr.edu/~humberto/

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