[Gcl-devel] Re: [Maxima] 5.9.0 release very close

[James Amundson]

On Fri, 2002-08-16 at 17:14, Camm Maguire wrote:
> Greetings!  No objections, rather congratulations!  Somewhere in the
> back of my mind I envisioned synchronizing the next gcl release with
> this maxima release, though I suppose its not really necessary.  
> 
> 1) Would such a synchronization be desirable?

That's a good question. I have an arguments both for and against
coupling.

For: It is in Maxima's interest that new releases of GCL precede new
releases of Maxima so that Maxima can be fully tested with the newest
version of GCL. It is in GCL's interest that new releases of Maxima
precede new releases of GGL so that GCL can be fully tested with the new
version of Maxima. The only logical compromise is to have simultaneous
releases.

Against: Having a program and the language in which it is written so
tightly coupled that one cannot be changed without the other is
obviously a bad thing.

Although the second argument is somewhat exaggerated, I think it wins
out over the first. At the very least, I don't think we *need* to couple
5.9.0 with a new release of GCL; Maxima builds just fine with 2.4.3
right now.

(Actually, I have one minor issue with the current release. 2.4.3
reports its version number as "2.5.0." I anticipate that could cause
confusion in bug reports. I apologize for not reporting this bug
sooner.)


> 2) The only issues of which I am aware regard the new build system,
>    which I believe relies on the lisp system's 'save-system' call or
>    analogous to do the final link of the compiled objects into the
>    resulting executable.  The old system used the system linker ('ld')
>    for this step, to avoid breaking builds on platforms for which gcl
>    could not relocate object code by itself.  Gcl is in the process of
>    implementing  native relocation on all supported platforms, but as
>    of this time, i386 coff, (e.g. Windows), mips, alpha, ia64, and
>    hppa do not have this functionality.  Can one use ld with the new
>    build system?

Ah. I was unaware of this issue. I would certainly like the Maxima GCL
build to be as portable as possible. We can change the way the link is
done under GCL. I just spent a some time reading the old Makefile.
Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear to me what it does, even though
I am a Makefile professional (a long story...)

Can you tell me roughly how the linking should work?

Thanks,
Jim