Re: [Gcl-devel] GCL GPL/LGPL license

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!

"Mike Thomas" <address@hidden> writes:

> AREA 2. If you remove UNEXEC you remove the ability to dump a running lisp
> system into a new executable (this method is used, for example, by both GCL
> and the Maxima computer algebra system).  All is not lost as you can either
> modify your build system to use ld to link up a bunch of object files to
> make a new application executable, or you can use the lisp function
> "compiler::link":
> 
> >(describe 'COMPILER::LINK)
> 
> COMPILER::LINK - internal symbol in COMPILER package
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> -
> COMPILER::LINK
> [Function]
> 
> Args: (COMPILER::FILES COMPILER::IMAGE &OPTIONAL COMPILER::POST
>           COMPILER::EXTRA-LIBS (COMPILER::RUN-USER-INIT T) &AUX
>           COMPILER::RAW COMPILER::INIT)
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> -
> 
> 
> eg: (compiler::link nil "c:/foo") makes a new lisp executable called
> c:/foo.exe on Windows using ld from the lisp prompt.
> 
> 
> | Will gcl be broken by
> | default without these libraries?
> 
> In the case of UNEXEC you will need to do some twiddling to remove it, I
> don't know if anyone has actually tried yet, but I would expect it wouldn't
> be too overwhelming.  It would probably be a good idea for us to put UNEXEC
> switching into configure at some stage - I might register it as a feature
> request in fact.
> 

Just a minor correction here -- our dependence on unexec is much
greater than this.  compiler::link gets around dumping images with
natively loaded compiled lisp object modules.  This strategy still
makes use of unexec to dump the saved image resulting from running the
lisp init code on said ld-linked compiled lisp modules.  Without this,
one needs a strategy for 're-lisp-linking' at each image start time,
or some such.  

unexec is *very* nice  -- I'm quite hesitant to distance ourselves too
far from it in the absence of equivalent functionality.

Take care,

> In closing, provided you can live with either of LGPL or GPL and provided
> you can do the tweaking to build without UNEXEC and BFD if you want LGPL
> then the flexibility is there for you.
> 
> Feel free to ask us if you need any further help with this stuff;  we
> appreciate your interest.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Mike Thomas.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> 
> 

-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
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