Re: ITP ptolemy?
On Sun, Jun 17, 2001 at 10:44:47AM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 15, 2001 at 10:12:39PM +1000, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> > I'm thinking about packaging ptolemy. This is a decent-sized
> > application useful for simulating electronics system, particularly
> > DSP. It's pretty cool stuff. The license is BSD.
> >
> > There's a complication though.. users can develop their own bits of
> > code (called stars, which become part of a galaxy), and their code is
> > dynamically linked to the ptolemy binary itself at runtime. So the
> > upstream authors say the user's code needs to be compiled with the
> > same version of gcc as ptolemy itself.
>
> isn't this what shared librariers and the concept of APIs are for?
>
> seems to me that the real long-term solution is for the ptolemy authors
> to design and implement an extension API, a plug-in architecture.
I'm not sure if they have this already or not. I think the problem is
more to do with symbol name mangling by g++; the user-supplied
extensions are compiled with g++, not just gcc.
I wonder if (m)any of the library packages in Debian are built with
g++. It's difficult to tell from the Sources file, because g++ is
build-essential. I think those libraries would have the same problem.
> at a guess, i'd say ptolemy would have to be at least 8-10 years old
> then. this kind of bundling was very common in the days before free
> *nixes and the net made it a reasonable assumption that such tools would
> be available and would/should be updated separately.
>
> it's always a severe PITA to extract this kind of program from its
> bundled dependancies.
It probably is quite old. They have a "Ptolemy II" now which is
a rewrite in Java. I'm not sure if it is functionally equivalent;
it won't be code compatible though. They just released it a few
months ago.
> how about a wrapper script for executing ptolemy and/or "stars"? it
> would compare the version of gcc used to compile gcc with the version
> of gcc used to compile the stars...recompiling the stars whenever
> necessary.
Hmm perhaps.. but you don't run stars from the command line, but within
the GUI environment. From memory you compile them within the GUI too.
> ps: it's easy to be a backseat driver...i'm not planning to do any of
> this work so feel free to dismiss my comments as impractical idealism.
Thanks for the input!
regards
Hamish
--
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish@debian.org> <hamish@cloud.net.au>
Reply to: