Re: [Axiom-developer] RE: State of play with GCL 2.6.5 on Windows

[root]

Mike,

>This seems sensible to me as, additionally, there are still some alterations
>in the toplevel makefile eg "pwd -W" which I am assuming don't work on other
>platforms and which would need to be handled in a system specific manner at
>that level.
>
>With regard to that issue, can we assume that the Axiom build will only
>support GNU make or do you plan to be more portable with regard build
>support tools (other than the Lisp compiler which you have discussed
>elsewhere)?

Hopefully axiom will build on every system with the minimum of changes.
Originally axiom used vanilla make but there were some features of gmake
that made it easier to use (e.g. the shell command). From my point of
view it would be better if everything was in common lisp as it makes
porting so much easier. I've had some discussions about moving the
C code portions (such as sockets and the X into CLX). I find it
incredibly tedious to port C code. The MACOSX and BSD ports of working
C code stumble over the fact that each system seems to have a need to
change the tree of includes. So portability is one of the key issues.
The less C code, the less we depend on special features of tools, the
easier life will be.

t