Re: [Axiom-developer] Ping: file removals

[root]

> I agree. In general there should not be any pdf files in the source
> code repository.

Eh? Methinks you've missed the whole point of aim of the axiom project.

Documentation in any form is to be desired and it often cannot be
created "from the source". PDFs can contain things, like fonts, which
the target machine may not have available. Video documentation will
certainly not be able to be created from the source as the rendering
of the video may require special equipment and tools.

The user might not have tools, like dvitopdf, or have different tools,
like dvi2pdf giving different results. Or the user might be on windows
without these tools at all. And if a 10 minute tutorial takes weeks to
create and hours to render with special tools (e.g. Camtasia) why
would we want the user to do that?  Why rerender .ps files that
exist? There are already complaints posted that axiom takes too long
to build.


I must say I'm completely confused by the current directions.
Who invented the idea that we need to recreate everything from source?
And who invented the idea that we don't keep exact copies of published
documentation (with ISBN numbers) in the archive?






> > One extra remark:  It make sense to put generated documentation
> > into distribution tarball, but IMHO generated files (with the 
> > exception of files needed to bootstrap) should be removed from
> > source archive.
> 
> Yes, I agree completely.

Again, methinks you've missed the whole point of the axiom project.

There is NO distinction between documentation and "source code". That is
oldthink. In this brave new world there are only literate programs.
Creating human readable output from human oriented input is THE soul
of the project. We need to completely entwine the research with the old
idea of source code and conflate the idea of compiling with the idea of
latexing the code. This is THE PRIMARY DESIGN GOAL of the axiom project.

Gaby and Waldek, you are both new to this project but it has now been
around for some 33+ years and free for the last 6 years. Under the guise
of "build improvements", which was originally started as an effort to
bring autoconf to axiom, I now see changes made and proposed that go
against the fundamental project goals. Please look around, read and
understand these goals. They've been written down and talked about
at length both in this group and online at various places.

Tim