[Axiom-developer] Re: bootstrap Meta/Boot

[Bill Page]

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2005-11/msg00211.html

From:   Mike Dewar
Subject:        Re: [Axiom-developer] letting my mud settle
Date:   Wed, 9 Nov 2005 10:40:09 +0000
User-agent:     Mutt/1.4.1i

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 12:09:23PM -0500, Bill Page wrote:
> I am not aware of any of Tim's past sins -- only his present
> ones. ;) Building Axiom from sources only, which was apparently
> a requirement imposed by restrictive licensing conditions which
> apparently prevented any of the previously commercial binary
> versions of Axiom to be distributed along with the Axiom source
> code, was certainly a challenge because of the way that Axiom
> had been designed to be "bootstrapped" from an existing running
> copy. But this is no different than the situation with most
> compilers and in particular GNU C (gcc).
Just for the record this is not true.  Arthur Norman offered to provide
an open-source version of CCL to the project which would have allowed
you to build and distribute a Unix version of Axiom from the original NAG
sources without any modifications.  I provided copies of the Axiom
product to several people on the list so you would have had no problem
bootstrapping the first open-source versions from the NAG code.

Eliminating the need for a running Axiom was a good thing to do, but if
anything forced you to do it it was probably the decision to develop on
GCL rather than CCL.

Cheers, Mike.

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2005-11/msg00220.html

From:   Mike Dewar
Subject:        Re: [Axiom-developer] letting my mud settle
Date:   Wed, 9 Nov 2005 17:42:31 +0000
User-agent:     Mutt/1.4.1i

On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 09:50:51AM -0500, Bill Page wrote:
> Do you mean that this original "Axiom product" binary - as distinct
> from the commercial binary version - could have been distributed as
> part of the original open source distribution? If that is true, it
> makes me sad that Tim went to all the trouble to embed bootstrap lisp
> code into the build process.
No, I mean that you could have bootstrapped the first open source binary
from the commercial system, and then distributed that first open
source-derived binary.

Cheers, Mike.

-------------------

On 8/10/07, address@hidden <address@hidden> wrote:
> Bill writes:
> > Well, actually I think that was just a misunderstanding on Tim's part.
> > Other emails on this list from Mike Dewar of NAG have made it clear
> > that NAG would have had no objections to releasing an open source
> > version of Axiom that required a running Axiom to compile.
>
> Please reference those emails.
>
> Tim
>
>
>
>