[isabelle-dev] NEWS: Isabelle sessions and build management

[Makarius]

On Sun, 29 Jul 2012, Florian Haftmann wrote:

> * Now, there are the ROOT file(s) and etc/sessions.  I wonder whether 
> this can be unified further, e.g. having just one sessions file in . or 
> etc/.

Right now etc/sessions is unused.  I merely added it pro-actively to 
support a speculative scheme for AFP where every directory can stand on 
its own, without being a component (because the latter concept does not 
scale to hundreds of them).  But AFP directories can also depend on each 
other, so it might be better to do it differently.

Lets see until the AFP setup is better understood.


> * When introducing HOL-Base, HOL-Plain etc., there was hope that each 
> one will build on top of its predecessor.  Maybe the present build 
> architecture now permits this, but I guess there is still the difficulty 
> of sharing document output etc.

The question is if HOL-Plain and HOL-Main still have any purpose.  Full 
HOL now takes < 2min on a reasonably fast machine with 4 cores.

Building images incrementally also takes extra time: saving and loading 
the image of HOL-Plain can be approx. 50% of its total runtime, depending 
on some side-conditions like the file-system performance.


 	Makarius