Develop julia base/* vs usr/share/julia/src/base/*

Internals & Design
1

I had cloned and built julia, and was playing around with some things in base/*, using Revise.track(Base), and seeing the changes in the REPL as I made them in the files. I restart julia and try to run things again, though nothing changes as I change the code. I realize that the functions are now defined in usr/share/julia/src/base/* by checking with @edit ....

Why does this happen, can I get back to how it was before? What is the difference between these two, seems to contain the same things?

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2

Did you have julia installed by some package manager as well? IIRC the default make does not “install” julia to /usr.

Generally, changes to functionality provided by Base is only visible when you’ve tracked those changes via Revise.track, since they are usually provided by a compiled sysimage (a sort of compilation cache to speed up startup of julia). This cache is of course not updated when you just change the source files - you’ll have to build a new system image by e.g. running make in the julia source directory again or using Revise.track to include those changes.

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Not /usr, but julia_cloned/usr/... (maybe that is what you meant, just want to make sure).

I do have other julia installations, though I don’t understand why they should interact.

I start this julia with julia_cloned/julia. Editing julia_cloned/base/* after running Revise.track(Base) does not seem to do anything anymore (used to work), and instead it seems that julia_cloned/usr/share/julia/src/base/* are the files I should edit.

I have tried to run make clean; make but didn’t change anything.

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No, I did mean /usr! Sorry for the confusion - disregard that part then.

Hmmmm… For me at least, building from source leads to julia_cloned/usr/share/julia/base just being a symlink to julia_cloned/base (same for test and each individual stdlib). Perhaps Revise doesn’t follow the symlinks?

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Those are also symlinks for me, though julia_cloned/usr/share/julia/src/base is not (notice the src), and that seems to be the base that is used for some reason.

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I do not have that src subdirectory :thinking: Which version did you build from source? Have you tried after make cleanall?

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Nope, running that one now. This seemed to remove the usr folder which clean didn’t. Feels like this might make the difference.

Building a recent branch from master, so should be pretty up to date
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/45656

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Didn’t help…

Will have to continue tomorrow, probably just remove and clone anew, hope that makes a difference.

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I can confirm the same after building a freshly cloned julia.

julia> @edit sin(1)

leads to

"~/julia/usr/share/julia/src/base/math.jl"

and Revise tracks this version of the code, which appears to be separate from that in ~/julia/base

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10

Oh yeah, forgot to get back to this. But continued to have the same problem even after cloning and rebuilding from scratch. I have just developed in that folder and then when it works I copy it over. But it is a little annoying and I really don’t understand what I did to cause this?

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