Re: [Axiom-developer] Build machinery -- support for out of source build

[Bill Page]

Gaby,

On 7/1/07, you wrote:

> ...
> I believe wh-sandbox was branched before I finished making build-improvements
> fully workable on windows.  I believe people have ecncountered amny variations
> of the problems there.

Just a minor point of clarification: wh-sandbox uses a slightly
different approach to satisfying the problems created by the
MSYS/MinGW cross-compilation environment for windows. Even though MSYS
presents a very minimal cross-compilation environment, it still must
distinguish between the directory structure of the host and target
environments more rigorously than when building natively on Linux. The
approach that you took in build-improvements was to ensure that all
paths were relative.

In wh-sandbox we took a different approach by introducing a new
environment variable called $BASE so that absolute and relative build
system paths (used in MSYS utilities) could be augmented with root
path information to create compatible absolute paths for those parts
of the build system that run natively on Windows such as gcl and it's
derivatives. As a result, arguably perhaps, the paths in wh-sandbox
are slightly easier to understand and could (maybe) be appropriate for
other situations in which we might need/want to do cross-compilation..
But I consider the approach take in build-improvements to be equally
valid for the problem at hand.

> On balance, I see the current steup having more problems than benefits it
> gives us on daily basis.

I have no question at all about the benefits of the build-improvements
style make files over the current build system in Axiom Gold and
Silver. I am glad that you are finding the time to explain your
rational for these changes.

Thanks.

Regards,
Bill Page.