Re: [Fwd: Re: [Axiom-developer] Building Axiom on Slackware]

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 9:50 PM, root <address@hidden> wrote:

> I await your diff-Naur patch for autoconf builds of the Axiom trunk.
> If you recall, I've asked for this since you first did autoconf.
> That never happened. Please include the patch with your next autoconf
> advertisement.

Well, I'm not advertising anything.  You asked for solution; I
suggested one that works -- which others beside me
have been using (e.g. FriCAS).  You are very welcome to dismiss
it under the name of diff --Naur or whatever.  The work is the
in the build-improvements branch; you are of course entirely
entitled to dismiss it -- it only appears curious that you would
complain of missing patch.

> You'll admit that autoconf would have failed if libXpm was not in the
> list of things to check. Exactly this kind of failure happpened with
> egrep last week. FriCAS, as I recall, did NOT use autoconf to fix it.

Everybody has his/her theology.  Putting aside the fact that I do
not see what egrep has to do with libXpm.so, I would have
reused AC_PROG_EGREP if the issue was reported to me.
But, by no means I do not claim it is superior to solutions that
do not exist yet.   It certainly solves the problem in a very scalable
way -- I do not need to keep a personal list of which platforms
has the right grep.  I just know the Autoconf macro has
been tested by thousands of thousands of system builders, thousands
of thousands times.  So, I do not need to reinvent my own
surely inferior hack.

> Do we really need to relive the whole debate? I certainly don't.
> If people think autoconf is vital, there are now alternatives.
> It seems like a "solved problem" to me.

I'm sorry for having -- for a second -- thought you were genuinely
looking for solution that has been tested to work (the Xpm problem).

Please, continue your regularly scheduled work and ignore
my suggestion (which Stephen reproduced) that happens to work
for OpenAxiom and FriCAS in the real world on real systems
(including the one you are talking about.)

-- Gaby