RE: [Axiom-developer] Re: Axiom trunk failure

[Page, Bill]

Tim, 

On Wednesday, May 03, 2006 11:20 PM you wrote:
> ... it takes a long time to make changes to axiom assuming
> you're going to ensure they are correct before releasing
> them to the world.

This is the wrong assumption to make about open source. You
are not "releasing" a product, you are doing collaborative
development - hopefully involving many other people. The
quality of the result depends on their participation.

> ... 
> about every 6 months i finish a major portion of axiom work
> (e.g. the original algebra, the original book, the browser
> recovery, the graphics recovery, the sman "feature complete"
> build, major ports, the tutorial book, etc). there are yet
> more in the pipe and when i sit down to work on axiom in the
> limited time i have available i need to work on big changes
> which make the system more useful and accessible. 
> 

It does not make sense that you are trying to do all this by
yourself. If Axiom is going to get anywhere this has to be a
collaborative effort.

> if you follow the GCL discussions from the past it is possible
> to re-engineer axiom so it will run on a natively installed GCL.
> to do that you need to:
> 
>   *) change configure to detect if gcl is installed
>   *) change configure to ensure that the native gcl is the
>      correct version and patch level
>   *) if not, build gcl from zips and apply the correct patches
> 
> i would note here that it is NOT acceptable to stop the build
> and insist that the user install/upgrade some other package.
> axiom builds should 'just work'.

I *strongly* disagree with this. Even the GCL build itself
will stop if it does not find the necessary prerequisits.
Satisfying prerequists is not the job of the build software.
This is handled by other tools like apt-get and yum.

> ... 
> there is no such thing as a simple job.
> 

There is such a thing as a job that is too large for one
man.

Regards,
Bill Page.