Re: [Aimmath-developers] AIM and Maple 9 not good news

[Greg G. <gr...@ma...>]

On Fri, 25 Jul 2003, Jon Breitenbucher wrote:
> Do you or maybe other developers have an idea of how many files this 
> will impact? I'll poke around and see what I find.

It should only be .mpl files in the WEB-INF/maple directory and 
subdirectories. I've just done the changes to a local develop_2_1 copy.
Essentially, what I did was:

  1. globally substituted LaTeX( for `aim/LaTeX`(
  2. globally substituted `LaTeX/ for `aim/LaTeX/
  3. moved the `aim/LaTeX... commands to aim/LaTeX.mpl
  4. added: aim/LaTeX   to PackageList
  5. added:
      
if Config['MapleVersion'] <= 8 then
  `Package/Assign`(`LaTeX/trim`        ,"", `aim/LaTeX/trim`):
  `Package/Assign`(LaTeX               ,"", `aim/LaTeX`):
  `Package/Assign`(`LaTeX/Subs`        ,"", `aim/LaTeX/Subs`):
  `Package/Assign`(`LaTeX/Wrap`        ,"", `aim/LaTeX/Wrap`):
  `Package/Assign`(`LaTeX/Display`     ,"", `aim/LaTeX/Display`):
  `Package/Assign`(`LaTeX/DisplayParse`,"", `aim/LaTeX/DisplayParse`):
fi;

     to aim/LaTeX.mpl so that the old names are still available in
     versions of Maple up to 8.

I've tested it out. It seems to be be working, except that I'm
getting a weird error:

Error reading image count file 
/usr/local/tomcat/webapps/AIM/imagecache/count: file or directory does not 
exist

on some questions I compile. I'm not convinced that whatever's causing 
this wasn't there before. Has anyone else observed this error or know what
I should look? Would you like me to commit my changes, anyway? ... or 
maybe I can send you the changed files as a .zip or .tar.gz file.

> > To try all this out, what version of AIM are you experimenting with
> > ... is it the one in develop_2_1?
> 
> Yes, I believe I am using develop_2_1 with modifications to several of 
> the files to get OS X support. I'll commit them once I've got things 
> working. Although I think I am the only person in the world whose using 
> these files. That's a frightening thing to think about.

I think that will change in time.
 
> I just installed a copy of command line Maple 8 beta for OS X (expires 
> at the end of August) and as expected it does not have any issues with 
> Maple to LaTeX. I may ask Maplesoft if they can give me a non-beta 
> license for Maple 8 CL. For the short term this may be my best option. 
> Even though I love working on AiM, I really should be working on things 
> that are publishable.
> 
> Also, even after switching to Maple 8 CL, some answers are still being 
> parsed in reverse (exp and maybe others).

I haven't a clue what could be causing this. When you hit Mark a bit of
javascript is invoked:

function Mark() {
 f = document.aimform;
 f.Command.value = 'try/Question';
 f.Action.value  = 'Mark';
 f.target = '_self';
 f.submit();
};

... perhaps you can work out from there what happens.
 
> As an aside, if you follow Gustav's suggestion and keep AiM in a 
> directory other than ROOT and don't mess with server.xml, you can run 
> multiple versions of AiM against different versions of Maple.

Yes, I sorted this out. Currently, I have the develop_2_1 version in
an AIM directory, and the original version upgraded to have the new
develop_2_1 features and some additional tweaks of my own I haven't
committed yet (they ought to be a little further first). However,
under admin. the Results stuff is all broken, presumably because it
hasn't had the multipart question stuff incorporated yet ...
could someone confirm that this is the case and maybe give me a few clues
how to fix it? (Our students are starting back for our second semester
here ... and I'd dearly love to have the focus/unfocus and multipart
questions available for them.)

  Regards,
  Greg