[Gcl-devel] Axiom build issues

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!  We're preparing for the gcl 2.6.2 stable release, which
will hopefully be the last stable for quite some time as we turn our
attention to the development branch.  Of course it is very important
for us to make sure this release is solid for axiom.  And its looking
quite good so far -- no apparent build problems (due to GCL) on any of
the Debian architectures (see

http://buildd.debian.org/build.php?pkg=axiom 

if interested).  There are a few small items I'd like to squeeze in,
the most important being to ensure that GCL exits with non-zero when
stdin is redirected from a file or pipe and a lisp error is triggered
-- this will stop the commands executed by make at that point.  And
there should be an option to quiet the banner.

Along these lines, I have a question about the regression tests.  It
would be nice if the output was compared to results known to be
correct, with the build bailing out otherwise.  Then one can be sure
by the mere fact that the build completes that the build is also
correct, (i.e. without having to wade through the output by hand).  Is
something like this already in place or possible?

There are a few other items in the Debian package build which are not
GCL related per se.  One is that the build will timeout on slow
machines when compiling expexpand.spad.  As was noted before, there
appears to be an inordinate amount of mysterious bignum garbage, or at
least relocatable garbage, being generated here which could be tracked
down at some point.  For the time being I've put in a hack to echo a
string every 15min in the background for some period while the make is
running.  Another alternative would be to turn on si::*notify-gbc*,
but this would enlarge an already copious output.

Then there is the question of the outstanding patch we're using in
Debian now 1) to use an external GCL, and 2) to use compiler::link to
build the image on machines which cannot do native relocations (alpha
ia64 mips(el) hppa).  Its fine the way it is, but I'm wondering if at
some point we can put in an alternate build target in the Makefiles
supporting these build commands in axiom per se.  I'd be happy to
maintain them if/when we decide on a rule structure.  The sequence
right now works without issue, but GCL could make this more
transparent on these platforms eventually.  Improvements in this area
should however be put off to the next stable release which will likely
be quite some time in the future.

On a totally different topic, has anyone written an emacs mode for
axiom?  I tried out the texmacs interface with the Debian package and
its broken.  There is a simple isse regarding paths and executable
names that I can workout with the texmacs maintainer.  But this aside,
one still gets garbage using the mode, at least for me.

Take care,

-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
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