On 2004-04-24 15:34:13 -0700 Aaron Sloman <A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk>
wrote:
> Brent,
> [AS]
> However it can be difficult getting things compiled on Suns
> (unless sun have changed their policy) so I included the
> Sun libraries provided by David Young.
That makes sense.
I guess it comes down to which areas you see Poplog having an
installed base. Just based on what I've seen in my short intro
to Poplog, it looks like x86 Linux machines are probably the most
common, now that home computers are powerful enough to run
this kind of software. And even "supercomputer" architectures
have been replaced (to some extent) by clusters of commodity
hardware.
At work, we run most of our financial systems on IBM RISC 6000
machines, which run AIX (a UNIX variant). But IBM tells me they
will be shifting more and more towards Linux on RISC because of
the benefits of open source, etc.
> But then I would have to separate the precompiled libraries from
> popvision. Perhaps I should do that anyway.
If we had a good build system, this would be relatively simple. Of
course, I'm only thinking in terms of Windows and Linux -- I have
no experience with Solaris and its build issues.
[AS]
> At Sussex the poplog programmers developed a sophisticated system
> which
> was all in one directory structure with lots of hard links (I don't
> know
> why they did not use symbolic links) which could be viewed in
> different
> ways.
[ ... cut description of Sussex build environment ... ]
> Unfortunately, I've not kept the src/master directory up to date, and
> others felt it would be better to move to cvs anyway.
I would agree that some kind of source control system would be great.
I'm most familiar with CVS, but it looks like subversion or maybe
'arch'
are gaining strong popularity.
> I guess debian runs on sparc too!
One nice thing about Debian is that we get good support from major
hardware vendors. We have several sparc machines, some alpha's,
one or two arm units, several multi-processor PowerPC systems, a
few 64-bit Intel and HPPA units, etc.
These facilities make it possible to support quite a few different
architectures, assuming the sources are suitably factored and
that there is a clear path to bootstrapping a system from one
architecture to another.
However, that work may not be that interesting to the Poplog community.
Most students and University environments are probably quite
happy with x86 support, and don't need much else. I do think
a working PowerPC port would be great because Macintosh OS X
is so easy to port to (owing to its BSD roots). And lots of university
students (at least hear in the United States) and many educational
institutions (especially at the junior and high school levels) are
based around Macintosh.
Anyway -- I'm rambling here. I would be greatly pleased if we could
work
towards keeping the sources in CVS (i.e., at the Sourceforge site) such
that I could check them out and generate a complete system from the
build environment.
That's something I have some familiarity with, and I'm willing to
spend a
bit of time working through some Makefiles and so forth. Once we
achieve that goal, supporting other architectures becomes much easier.
Thanks,
-Brent
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