RE: Bignum not detected by default
"Ben Wing" <ben(a)666.com>, on Sat, 12 Feb 2005
11:13:28 -0600
you wrote:
> Jerry -- how come you have to specify use-number-lib to get
bignums?
> Why aren't they detected by default by configure?
It's still considered an experimental feature. If the Board
considers it to be sufficiently stable, we could vote to make
it autodetected.
I would support this.
In my opinion, the GNU MP stuff is quite stable. I've used
it a fair amount over the last 9 months or so with no
problems. The BSD MP stuff is terrible, though. BSD MP is
just too limited. We should probably remove support for it.
Since it's your code, you make the call.
We should also consider Hrvoje's suggestion that we make it
possible to unpack a GNU MP tarball into the XEmacs build
tree, then detect and use it if there is no installed GNU MP
library. This is somewhat complex because you really want to
build GNU MP with optimizations for the CPU you actually
have. An i386-optimized GNU MP performs terribly on a
Pentium 4, for example. If we can solve that problem, we can
eventually make the move to requiring GNU MP, which would
make all kinds of simplifications possible.
I'm a bit leery of this. In the past I've suggested at various times that
certain libraries should be incorporated into XEmacs, mostly because of
their importance and/or lack of current support (e.g. Xpm). However, others
have convinced me that this is a major maintenance hassle. The same
arguments would apply here. For GNU MP, under MS Windows there isn't even a
native Makefile -- the "prescribed way to build" is to use MinGW and then
manually run some magic commands to generate a Windows import library.
Hmmmmph. And no way to static build.