Dear GAP Forum,

Dima Pasechnik mentioned (already several weeks ago. Apologies for not
responding sooner) some problems with the location of the GAP4 binary files.

I noticed that in the latest release one has
GAP_PRG=`hostname`/gap
in <gap-home>/bin/gap.sh

This is a relic from GAP3 times. Thank you for reminding us of it, we will
change it in the next release.

He continues:

Also, using the compiler name in the name of the target
directory is not really consistent
(e.g. <gap-home>/bin/i686-unknown-linux2.0.33-gcc)
Indeed, why would one care which compiler is used to
compile the executable (rather than for the purposes of
debugging, of course).

Debugging and development certainly is a major point. When testing the
portability we often have to try different compiler on the same platform. In
this situation it is helpful that the directory name includes the compiler.

On the other hand once GAP is set up a user would not have to refer to the
directory name any longer anyhow, so the slight inconveniece of having to
type the compiler name is probably acceptable here.

For purposes of network installations one often even does not want the full
release number of the OS (There were times when our network had machines
with linux 2.0.30, 2.0.32, 2.0.34 and 2.0.35) but something weaker. The best
way around this is to link all these potential directory names to the same
directory.

Best regards,

Alexander Hulpke

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