Re: [Gcl-devel] RE: [Maxima] Re: Maxima cmucl patch

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!  Mike, thank you as always for your lucid and very helpful
exposition of this somewhat confusing situation.  I think you've made
the case pretty convincingly that our MinGW32 port is somewhat more
important than any other due to its ability to ship self-contained
binaries and avoid slow emulation layers.  I.e. make the user
experience as painless as possible.  (BTW, does your binary gcl
package just contain mingw gcc and gcl?)

As for developers, there are competing concerns -- designing a
self-contained build process could attract people unused to the GNU
toolchain, but having to reinvent all that functionality ourselves and
for each project (i.e. gcl, maxima....), or to maintain a fork kept in
sync with a traditional unix-like autoconf setup, would seem rather
onerous given our current resources.  It would appear that you've
found the right balance -- building on MSYS lets you use unix build
tools without requiring a unix runtime for the user (if I understand
correctly).  Is using/installing MSYS really difficult for a 'windows
developer'?  I know you indicated that you are happy with the status
quo, but I'd like your opinion on whether our current windows build
setup by itself is turning away interested windows contributors.

In like manner, I've never understood the efforts by some to reproduce
the functionality of 'make' within lisp itself (i.e. defsystem??)  In
other words, once we have a working tool, why not just use it, even if
'not invented here', and go on to the business at hand?  Provided of
course that said tool is not too difficult to obtain?

Anyway, just $0.02.

"Mike Thomas" <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi all.
> | On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 10:18, Camm Maguire wrote:
> | > Greetings!
> | >
> | > James Amundson <address@hidden> writes:
> | > > (When I am done, windows builds without MinGW should be a reality...)
> | It is my hope that a more "native" compilation
> | system for windows will attract more contributions from people expert in
> | windows. We *desperately* need them.
> 
> I agree absolutely!  Likewise on the GCL project although I am happy to
> stick with MSYS hosted MinGW32 because of the greater need for autoconf.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Mike Thomas.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 

-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
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