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

[James Amundson]

On Thu, 2002-08-22 at 23:54, Camm Maguire wrote:
> Greetings!
> 
> James Amundson <address@hidden> writes:

> > > 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?
> > 
> 
> Yes, roughly the .lisp is compiled to .o and .data as usual by gcl.
> Instead of then running gcl again to load the .o and save-system, ld
> is run on the .o files to create a raw_maxima, and then an
> initialization command is read by raw_maxima to initialize its modules
> and save-system to saved_maxima.  If you need more detail, please let
> me know.  I can pre-test for you on a relevant box before your
> release, if you'd like.

OK. I am going to admit defeat here. I have now spent several hours on
this problem with very little progress to show for it. The Maxima build
is currently defined by the defsystem description. I am to the point
with defsystem and Lisp where I think I understand what happens with
files that are compiled, loaded and evaluated in the presence of
eval-when and defsystem options. I cannot say the same for the gcl build
using the linker. In my experiments, I tried compiling the files with
defsystem, then using a "make saved_maxima" in the gcl/unixport
directory using the compiled object files. I do not understand how to
take care of the files that are simply loaded, however. There are
probably other things I don't understand, also. (From a configuration
management standpoint, I find the ld procedure highly frightening, but
perhaps I misunderstand what really needs to be done.) The bottom line
is that I do not understand how to recreate the system created with
defsystem using the gcl ld process. If someone can show me how to do it,
we can try to incorporate it as an option in the build.

The good news is that the current build works with Windows and MinGW.
Clisp also works under Windows, so we have decent coverage there.

--Jim