On 2010/10/15, at 20:25 , Thomas Kahle wrote:

> Hi *,
>
> I had a short email conversation with pchrist@g.o regarding
> sci-mathematics/axiom, which I bumped to the latest version in the
> science overlay.  The ebuild is suboptimal, but here is my original
> message, any comments appreciated:
>
> ----snip----
>
> over at the science overlay we are trying to revive
> sci-mathematics/axiom which heavily relies on gnu common lisp (and no
> other dialect).  In fact, the current ebuild will ship an internal
> version of what axiom upstream calls gcl-2.6.8_pre4.
>
> Do you have any specific plans of reviving gcl? What are the
> difficulties that you are facing?
>
> One problem that I found myself is that gcl (at least the version that
> comes with axiom) seems to depend on <=dev-libs/gmp-4, so I emailed  
> Camm
> Maguire (who seems to be gcl upstream).  He was surprised to learn  
> about
> the release of gmp-5, which was not on his radar because appearently  
> it
> is not in Debian Unstable yet.
>
> Ok, so this is about it.  I would love to see an unmasked gcl at some
> point.  Let me know if I can help.  I'm currently being recruited as a
> developer.
>
> ----- snap-----
>
> Comments? Ideas?

Wouldn't it be better to port axiom to Common Lisp and let it run on  
any good CL implementation instead?  It would surely do nicely on SBCL.


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__
http://www.informatimago.com