Re: [j-devel] Build to-do

[Mark E. <ev...@pa...>]

Philip Hudson wrote:
> Can I suggest an addition to the to-do list, if not already there:  
> unify the Java class file output directory used by the ant build and  
> the hosted-lisp build? Should be trivial.

[…]

I had created [ticket 37][37] about a month ago to track this as an 
issue, so this has been on the TODO list for a while.  My time for ABCL 
has become rather scarce lately, but should change back soon.

While it seems easy, there are some issues:

A) One has to copy the Lisp source over to this directory as well for 
the code in 'compile-system.lisp' to work correctly, making me worry 
about platform issues.

B) The JAR that results from the hosted-Lisp build is no longer 
identical to the Ant build (it contains *.cls and *.abcl files, among 
other difficulties

C) Maintaining the two systems can be quite a chore (witness the recent 
problem reported by Blake McBride because the ABCL maintainers "forget" 
to include the new org.armedbear.lisp.util classes in the hosted-Lisp build.

D) The hosted-lisp has a lot of platform dependent macros for a wide 
variety of Lisp implementations.  I can only really test with SBCL and 
CLISP, so I was a little worried about breaking things that at least 
work right now.

A and B are certainly within "easy reach" of a night's hacking.  If you 
develop patches that smooth things out, I'll definitely try to commit 
them fast-like.

For C, I was speculating privately at using the build.xml as the source 
of which files to do what by parsing the XML from Java via ABCL.  We 
would have to then have "special variable names" in build.xml, but we 
could definitely cut down on the maintenance somewhat as we add/move 
around files in the ABCL source tree.  As a by-product, we would get the 
start of an XML parser in ABCL for free (XML parsing has been a part of 
Java since Java 1.4).  Not sure how much this approach would be worth 
the time.

And for D, I really didn't have a great ideas.  My guess is we will 
break somethings until people complain about them on the more esoteric 
Lisp platforms.

If you patch, I will commit!

Mark

[37]: http://trac.common-lisp.net/armedbear/ticket/37



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