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

[Sean Whitton]

Hello,

I can review and sponsor Xiyue’s upload to Debian.

-- 
Sean Whitton

Please excuse top-posting and brevity. I am writing to you from a mobile phone.

> On 10 Dec 2024, at 12:19, Xiyue Deng <manphiz@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
> <signature.asc>