To List --

Greetings

I want to echo Mr. Hashemi very well written post to the list outlining the state of our binary and source compile depository for GPC. 

As a recent member to the list I must acknowledge that my perspective is thereby limited to recent events here. However, I think it is time to seriously consider bringing our source/compile and binary code distribution of GPC forward with substantial improvements.

Such a recommendation is not meant as criticism of efforts so far, but it must have occurred to others who monitor this list that there seems no obvious and accessible, centralized repository for  the GPC for each the supported platforms, including up-to-date documentation for compilation or installation.

I would like to open this thread of discussion with the goal of hearing from others on this topic. The goal can be by then end of Jan 2009 to have a plan to bring things on this topic to a better state of affairs with the help of the maintainers and members of the group.

Prince Rily




On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 11:16 AM, Kevan Hashemi <hashemi@brandeis.edu> wrote:
Dear GPC,


http://www.math.uni.wroc.pl/~hebisch/gpc/gpc-20070904.tar.bz2

I have this archive decompressed on my desktop. It looks like I'll have
to download another set of source files: those for GCC. The install
instructions use GPC version 20041218 as an example and tell me to
download GCC 3.4.3's source code. I don't know which version of GCC to
download for the GPC version 20070904.

After that, there are seven steps to follow for compilation. From
experience, I'm guessing this process is going to take me all morning.
All kinds of things can go wrong. I may even break my existing GCC
installation by mistake.

There is a 20041218 binary distribution on

http://www.gnu-pascal.de/binary/

but I can't find a newer version.


http://adriaan.biz/gpc/gpc346u2-sources.tar.bz2

On MacOS, I download this archive, is self-extracts, I run the build command, and off it goes. It's great.

I had to convert to .tar.gz before I could open the archive on my Linux machine. The build command aborts on Linux: it's for MacOS only. Now I look at the archives in the directory structure and I can't guess where the generic Makefile is that might help me compile the source code. I see no instructions that will help me figure out where the source code is.

So, the Linux user appears to be stuck with choosing between:

(1) GPC 20041218 binary distribution (10-minute install)

(2) Compiling new source code (4-hour install)

(3) http://www.freepascal.org/ (inferior schema types)


Yours, Kevan



--
Kevan Hashemi, Electrical Engineer
Physics Department, Brandeis University
http://alignment.hep.brandeis.edu/