[I'm forewarding this to debian-devel because this seems to be the
right list for this kind of issues.]
Short intro for debian-devel: We are discussion about including GT.M,
a free MUMPS implementation available at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fis-gtm
into Debian to be able to package VistA, which is an enterprise grade
health care information system developed by the U.S. Department of
Veterans Affairs (VA) and deployed at nearly 1,500 facilities worldwide.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openvista
The problem is that you need a running GT.M to build GT.M in a
bootstrap process. Please read the mail from one of the authors below.
On Mon, 11 Feb 2008, K.S. Bhaskar wrote:
[KSB] On account of the bootstrapping. You have to have a running GT.M at some point, or you have to simulate a running GT.M by hand. Think about bootstrapping a C compiler that is itself written in C. At some point, you need to do something to compile the compiler, e.g., compile it by hand. Once you have an executable binary of the first compiler, you can use it compile the next compiler, and so on. For GT.M, you will need the *_ctl.c, merrors_ansi.h, and ttt.c files, which are generated by GT.M itself (they are all human readable ASCII files). So, what you can do is to use an existing version of GT.M to create those files, read them to confirm that they look reasonable, i.e., no hidden binary code, and then build the new GT.M and use the new GT.M to build itself and verify that the files are the same. If you can think of any other way out of the bootstrapping conundrum, please do let me know.
Well, if you do not know I do not have an idea either - but lets see whether somebody at this list comes up with some solution.
I would like to build Debian packages to include GT.M into the Debian GNU Linux distribution. ...I do understand the spirit of the Debian requirement, but I wonder how it is applied to gcc. You must have gcc to compile gcc.
Any idea how to solve this problem? Any volunteers to package GT.M?
Kind regards
Andreas.
PS: There was also RFP bug #175968 filed a long time ago which was
closed because nothing happened in this direction.
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