Re: [Axiom-developer] Bootsys and Depsys history

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Ralf Hemmecke <address@hidden> wrote:

> Recently, Waldek removed BOOT in favour of SHOE. Then he switched to compile
> the .boot files with bootsys.

Some data points:  OpenAxiom had removed depsys for years and exclusively used
what is being called SHOE (bootsys in OpenAxiom) to build the entire
compiler and
interpreter suite.  One of the earliest things I did was to have a
simple diff tool that
compared the output of both old and new bootsys, to spot syntactic differences.
My own experience is that SHOE feels much better to work with than depsys or
equivalent.  Once you remove depsys, you would realize that the system is much
simpler in structure than one might realize.  It is an unnecessary complexity.
Your mileage may vary.

> While seemingly FriCAS compiles fine, libaxiom.al currently does not.

Until the recent release, OpenAxiom used to have the Aldor interoperability
boot files. They were removed from the last release.  My suspicion is
that it would be
much easier to work with Aldor 2 (when it comes to life) with a sound existing
AXIOM system than try to work backward.  Your mileage may vary.

> The first problem was missing parentheses in ax.boot. But there is another
> one which I am currently trying to track down. If I didn't have "git bisect
> run" I would give up. But so it's just waiting for the computer to show the
> bad commit.

I used to maintain an "incompatibility" list between new boot and old boot.
I also built into the SHOE translator a compatibility detector which
was very handy.
Experience taught me it would be unwise to attempt the move without
assistance from tools.
After the conversion, and after two releases (I think), I also removed the list
because at the time OpenAxiom was the only AXIOM that made the move to
build the entire system with SHOE.