Developers

Axiom Gold Branch is the authoritative source for a working Axiom system.

For those who want to get the latest see AxiomDevelopment. This will take you to a page that describes how to get the latest version of the code. Note that code is changed on an almost-daily basis, at least in some branch and that the code is almost certainly broken and may not even compile. See Axiom Silver Branch.

The point of this archive is to open up the development of axiom, to make it possible for others to collaborate effectively and make the development transparent. Since only the fully tested endpoints ever get put on savannah it appears that nothing is changing between observed endpoints. While I realize that the universe works this way at a fundamental level and such changes are not observable this is not the case with Axiom.

If you're willing to jointly work on developing some new feature we can create a branch where we can work together. Once it works we can merge the changes back to the main line and eventually back to savannah.

See also Axiom Sources.

Building Axiom on Linux

To compile the code, have a look at the README and the FAQ files in the main directory. You must have pre-installed a recent version of gcc, gnu make, and core utilities. Then run configure and make the usual way:

    cd axiom--main--1 -- axiom source root directory
    ./configure       -- Cut-and-paste environmnet variables
    make              -- the build takes about 5 hours at 2.4 GHz

Note that Axiom's ./configure script requires that you manually set the environment variables before running make.

If you want to use the Aldor compiler see Aldor For Axiom.

Building Axiom on Mac OS X

I have built axiom on Mac OS X 10.4.8 PowerPC?. Here are the steps I followed.

1. Install X Code Tools from the Apple instalation DVD.
2. you need latex, makeindex, and maybe tex for the axiom build to succeed, so I install them from fink, and link them to /usr/local/bin.
3. Some of the fink tools cause gcl to build incorrectly, I delete references to /sw/bin and /sw/sbin from my path:

     $ PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/local/bin
   

4. Get the build-improvements branch from SVN. svn on the Mac had issues with some of the filenames in axiom, I was able to use svk to get the sources. Information on getting the build-improvements branch is available on AxiomSources.
5. Check to see if your sources use openpty in src/lib/openpty.c.pamphlet, if not you need something like this patch
6. Do the gnu 3 step waltz:

     $ ./configure
     $ make
     $ export AXIOM=`pwd`/target/powerpc-apple-darwin8.8.0
     $ PATH=$AXIOM/bin:$PATH
     $ axiom
   

gcl doesn't (yet) build on Mac OS X on Intel chips.

I am updating to Fedora FC5 my FC4 system and tried to compile Axiom from CVS sources. I had problems with two graphics applications using the static library libXpm.a.

These are in the catalogs src/hyper and src/graph/view2D where the code was statically linked against libXpm.a which is no longer provided by FC5. I thus replaced the static link ${XLIB}/libXpm.a by -lXpm in order to compile.

Since now many codes use dynamic libraries I thing that the modification is conservative and should work under most systems.

Hope this helps.

Renaud

Here is a diff for view2D:

  diff -r1.3 Makefile.pamphlet
  286c286
  <        -o ${OUT}/view2D ${XLIB}/libXpm.a $(LDFLAGS)
  ---
  >        -o ${OUT}/view2D -lXpm $(LDFLAGS)