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Date:Sat, 24 Apr 2004 22:34:18 +0000 (UTC) 
Subject:Re: Poplog Debian Package Available 
From:A . Sloman 
Volume-ID: 

Brent,

[AS]
> > I guess this means clearly separating the stuff that
> > is linux specific (eg installation scripts) from the
> > stuff that is not, merging the bham stuff (including
> > emacs directory) with the 'main' poplog tree, getting
> > rid of dependency on $poplocalbin,
> > etc.

[BF]
> Integrating the various packages would make life
> a bit simpler, but it's not too bad.
>
> One slightly strange thing was that the linux packages
> include object code for the Alpha and Sun systems
> (I think this is for the popvision library).  Was
> this on purpose?

I guess there's no point including the alpha versions because
anyone who has an alpha is bound to have suitable compilers.

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.

This is an example of a case where a more intelligent package
building strategy than I have been using would help.

But then I would have to separate the precompiled libraries from
popvision. Perhaps I should do that anyway.

> I think one thing that would be helpful (though
> perhaps a bit long-term) would be to bundle the
> "system agnostic" sources separately from the runtime
> engine for the interpreter.  This way you could have
> one bundle of platform-independent stuff that could
> be used everywhere, along with a much smaller set
> of sources that would have to be bootstrapped on each
> architecture.

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.

It is online here, basically as it was around 1999 with a few
corrections in the main tree plus recent changes in the new/
sub-directory:
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/src/master/
packaged here:
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/src.tar.gz
        This was over a year old, so I have just rebuilt it.
        It's about 32 Mbytes

The directories S.* are meant to be complete systems
(without compiled code).

The directories C.* contain sources and documentation common to
some category, e.g. a  hardware platform (e.g. sparc, alpha, win32) or a
type of operating system (e.g. unix, or sun, or windows). They had a lot
of code in pop11 and shell scripts for maintaining the tree, operating
locks, etc. so that several people could work on the system.

The src/gz directory contains some binaries compiled elsewhere, e.g. for
HPUX. I have not included those in the src.tar.gz file.

Unfortunately, I've not kept the src/master directory up to date, and
others felt it would be better to move to cvs anyway.

For a while I used to update and rebuild the linux, solaris and alpha
poplog packages because we were using all of them. I no longer have
access to alpha machines. We now use linux far more than solaris, but I
do try to install updates in the solaris package here:
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/new/solaris1553.tar.gz

but I have not done so for about a year, partly because of problems
using suns compilers. I suppose I should have a go at rebuilding
all of it with Gcc, but I've given higher priority to other
things.

I guess debian runs on sparc too!

I've put an entry for debian in

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html

Aaron