Gaby, On Tuesday, August 01, 2006 3:50 PM you wrote: > > Instead of fiddling at infinitum with the new build machinery on > my local disk. I decided to trim it down to something "simple" to > request feedback about some aspects of the work. > > The core goal is to move Axiom's build system to GNU Autotools > which have become quite standard now, in the Unix-world.
Yes! ++1 > > For that I've converted the current configure file to > configure.ac (which Autoconf will use to regenerate configure). > The main motivation here is factor out many platforms variability > issues and dump them on Autoconf -- who already knows how to solve > them. > > Axiom has the requirement that the source files must be > literate -- use of pamphlet files. Autoconf expects its input to > be in particular form. Furthermore, the pamphlet file requirement > introduces an unpleasant bootstrapping issue that will hopefully > be resolved. Are you referring to the problem of the noweb dependency? I think this is not so much of a problem if we treat it properly as a dependency. configure.ac itself should be a named chunk - probably in the main Makefile.pamphlet. This might make regenerating ./configure a little more complex than usual but not much. Most open source installations ship a pre-generated ./configure file and I think Axiom should be no different. The first thing ./configure should do is check for noweb and tell you what to do about it if it is not found. One "last resort" option to ./configure can be to build and install noweb from the sources supplied with Axiom. But in general Axiom should not be in the business of re-distributing noweb. > So, in its current form, I put the literate stuff in comments, so > that if you do > > cat configure.ac | sed -e 's/^## //' > configure.tex > > you can an almost LaTeX file. "Almost" because LaTeX commands need > to start with a backslash. That character used to be reserved for > line continuation in shell world. So to avoid any surprise, I used > the percent character (which unfortunately is LaTeX comment > character). So to get the LaTeX document, one needs to apply another > sed that replaces the percent character with the backslash character. > > I've tested that I can feed the file to Autoconf, get a configure > file out of it and launch a successful build. > > This work is being done on the "build-improvements" branch -- and it > has not been committed there yet. > > Before painting myself into a corner, I would like to have feedbacks > from all y'all. > All this looks like a horrible hack to me - unless I am missing something fairly basic. What is wrong with the usual way of using noweb? Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
