Re: [Axiom-developer] build un-portability

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

"Bill Page" <address@hidden> writes:

| Gaby,
| 
| On November 10, 2006 2:07 PM you wrote:
| > 
| > Waldek Hebisch <address@hidden> writes:
| > 
| > | Looking at document script I noticed that it normally uses
| > | unquoted values, which may cause trouble with embedded
| > | spaces. So I decided to try building axiom in a directory
| > | which contained space in its name. Configure worked nice,
| > | but build failed immediatly...
| > 
| > From my experience, pathnames with embedded space always
| > cause problems for Unix-based tools.  I'm not worried about
| > them at the moment, e.g. they are very low priority on my
| > list of things to do in build-improvements. 
| > 
| 
| I am afraid that you have also just stated the reason why
| embedded space in file names always cause problems for unix
| based tools - because the developers give this a very low
| priority. But it is a serious issue when porting to both
| Windows and MAC where spaces in file names are common. At
| very least we should try not to write code that we know is
| not portable.

In this particular case, I suspect that Axiom will be best built under
Cygwin or variants where Unix convertion is quite dominant (I know you
can use the Windows style, but very often they cause troubles).  And
it is just easy to fix the environment.  In this particular case.  I'm
not saying Axiom should not support them.  I'm saying it really has
low priority on lis of things to do.  From experience, I know that for
GCC we had people trying to build GCC with embedded colons.  That was
a pain in the ass and usually led to obscure codes.  
My personal opinion is that the codes should not be obscured just to
support exotic stuff.  YMMV.

| Speaking of your "list of things to do in buid-improvments":
| Have you already or are you planning to publish this list?

I suspect a good part of it is in README.build-improvements.  The rest
keeps poping when I try different ideas in different local trees.
I'll upate README.build-improvements.  Some of them are not really
related to build machinery.

-- Gaby