Re: Merging MPS a.k.a. scratch/igc, yet again

[Xiyue Deng]

Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:

> Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Taking a look at README-IGC, it seems like we're still missing build
>> instructions for Debian.
>
> AFAIK Debian does not package MPS.
>
> The instructions I added to README-IGC for building MPS from their git
> repo are distro-agnostic. They are tested in Debian Trixie (a.k.a
> Testing) which is what I have installed on all the machines I regularly
> use.
>
> In fact, I'm pretty sure that any experienced autotools hacker can add
> MPS to the Emacs build in no time. The only annoying bit is that some
> MPS headers collide with Emacs', so I chose to instruct the user to copy
> the needed headers to a new directory and tell the config script to use
> it.
>
>

If making MPS available in Debian would help Emacs packaging I'm willing
to work on this (in the coming weeks as igc may not land with the
upcoming Emacs 30 release so not in a hurry.)

I have a few questions regarding the Emacs/igc usage of MPS:

* Does igc require only mps.{h,c} or more sources from the MPS source
  package?  It looks like there are many sources and it's autotools
  build script fails with GCC 14.2 in Debian Trixie due to several
  "-Werror"s.  It may be easier to just compile and ship the required
  subset, though it may require providing a custom build script.

* Does igc work with a dynamically linked MPS library?  Currently I have
  seen people suggesting that directly compiling the source, which is
  effectively like using MPS as a static library.  It would be less
  useful to package a static-only library in Debian because in case of
  any issues (usually security) updating the library is insufficient and
  its dependencies would need to be rebuilt as well.  Using a dynamic
  library would solve this scalability issue, and it would be good to
  know if igc can work with a dynamically linked MPS.

* Does igc work with the latest tagged version (release-1.118.0) or only
  the latest snapshot?  Packaging a tagged version would be easier,
  though working with a snapshot may also work with a bit of extra
  efforts.

-- 
Regards,
Xiyue Deng

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