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Re: [Axiom-developer] solaris


From: C Y
Subject: Re: [Axiom-developer] solaris
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 05:12:25 -0700

> On Monday, September 15, 2014 1:43 AM, "address@hidden" <address@hidden> 
> wrote:

> > Cliff, 
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by a "minimalist TeX executable". Are
> you thinking of producing a TeX in lisp? That would be amazing!

That wasn't my thought with ModTeX - there, I just wanted to get a handle on 
what made up TeXlive and whether it was possible to (say) build a version with 
a lot fewer libraries and packages if all you wanted to do was convert basic 
TeX with no fancy packages into DVI files, old-school Knuth style.  The idea 
was to be able to "bootstrap" a complete literate programming environment 
portably from nothing but a C/C++ compiler.

I wasn't actually targeting ModTeX at Axiom per say - I was just looking into 
what would be involved with making a "pre-packaged" literate programming 
environment that could easily be incorporated into and bootstrapped by projects 
as part of their standard build, in order to minimize the additional system 
infrastructure that has to be installed for the paradigm to work.

I've been tempted in the past to dig into cl-typesetting to try and create a 
Lisp TeX front-end for it, but the advertising-clause license and total lack of 
documentation ended up as blockers.  (Oddly, enough, cl-bibtex already exists 
so that's one piece already handled...)  Now with the license change it's 
probably worth digging into it for real, if CAD weren't eating up 110% of my 
available coding time these days...

> What shell scripts are you having trouble with? I don't recall
> writing shell scripts for anything but I write a lot of code so
> it wouldn't surprise me. We can certainly eliminate existing ones.

The shell scripts are part of TeXlive, not Axiom.

> The 'make' machinery will go away at some point. Axiom doesn't
> really need any of the features. We need to create a build
> function in lisp that knows how to build Axiom. Small portions
> are already in books/tangle.lisp to automatically extract the
> help files and the input files.

Long ago, Stephen Wilson and I did some experiments with ASDF to make it 
pamphlet aware:

http://brlcad.org/~starseeker/asdf-literate.lisp.pamphlet
brlcad.org/~starseeker/asdf-literate.pdf

My recollection is that this actually ended up working reasonably well, 
although obviously for Axiom's new pamphlet set up it would need some rework.

> Camm has done work to make Axiom run without including GCL. Once
> I get some time I will insert his changes. After that, we need a
> lisp (build) function to replace 'make'. It is really trivial to
> create since all it does is the same sequence make currently uses
> (which is printed on the console). At that point, 'make' machinery
> is gone. This might happen before the next release but I wouldn't
> count on it.

OK, so ASDF is probably overkill then.

> Axiom will eventually only depend on a C compiler, latex, and lisp,
> assuming your browser is up to date.

*Very* nice.

> It is all "in motion"... it just takes time....

Amen.

CY



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