[Ecls-list] ECL on Mac OS X, general new-to-ECL issues

[Juan Jose Garcia Ripoll]

Thomas F. Burdick wrote:

>Okay, that makes sense.  What systems do you and ECL's major users
>normally use?  It might be nice to have a note on the web page saying
>something like "ECL is regularly tested on Linux/x86 and MS Windows
>(or whatever). [...]
>  
>
Yes, indeed I want to at least rewrite the webpages in the coming days. 
For instance I still don't know how the "install.html" page got 
overwritten by the "download.html" As for the supported platforms, I 
myself run all Suse/RedHat/Windows on x86-32 regularly so those are the 
best supported platforms. Jullian Stecklina uses ECL mostly on 
FreeBSD/x86-32 and maintains a port for it. I know there are other 
people here using MacOSX because they have contributed patches, but as 
mentioned before I cannot test them seriously. Outside from that, I 
build and test (using Paul's test suite) from time to time ECL on 
NetBSD/x86, FreeBSD/x86, Sparc64/Solaris, Linux/Alpha, and lately 
Linux/AMD64.

>Just to be clear, because tone doesn't always communicate well over
>e-mail, I'm not complaining about these issues, just trying to orient
>myself in ECL, and to point out the rough edges I encountered as a new
>user.  I understand that ECL has been mostly a one-man effort, and I
>appreciate that you've kept alive the system I read about in the
>EcoLisp paper ages ago.
>  
>
Sure, no misunderstanding here. I appreciate when people spot those 
"rough edges", because I do not have many chances to find them.

>I still don't have a net connection at home, so I'll try to send a
>Darwin patch when I remember.  BTW, I had some trouble building on
>Solaris, too; if anyone reading the list has something jumpt to mind,
>let me know, otherwise I'll try to figure it out or at least send a
>useful bug report :-)
>  
>
TIA for the patches. As for Solaris, there are some problems with that 
port on Sparc. Namely, GMP likes to compile on 64-bit mode while by 
default the C compiler produces 32-bit executables. In this case, it is 
better to configure using
    ./configure --enable-guess-hosts-flags ....
where "..." denotes any other flags you need. This does a two-step 
process: first configure GMP, find out the best flags from there and 
then configure ECL.

>Hey, I like the pace that the SLIME work is progressing at, at this
>rate the SLIME interface will be there by the time I actually get a
>chance to seriously investigate ECL!
>  
>
The worst part is still left: the functions for querying frames and 
execution environments in ECL are a horrible legacy from KCL and I 
should figure out a better interface.

Regards,

Juanjo