Re: [Maxima-discuss] Who is maintaining the emacs lisp code, e.g. dbl.el?

[Rocky B. <ro...@gn...>]

Thanks for the information which confirms what the data seems to say: the
Elisp code is unmaintained.

At the time this was written, including the emacs code inside maxima made a
lot of sense. After all, why bother with maintaining two related projects
--  maxima and Elisp code for that -- when you can just distribute them
together in one? (In many of my debugger projects, I in fact did the same
thing.)

But nowadays, this generally isn't common practice for Emacs. So I don't
think patching the code makes sense. Ultimately it should be removed from
maxima when there is a suitable replacement. (And in the meantime, you
might warn that the code is a bit old and unmaintained)

Current Emacs practice would be to distribute such code via ELPA or MELPA .
Decoupling the two allows decoupling the release cycle of the two - each
can be released independently when it makes sense. And it allows for
different sets of ownership of the two projects. Clearly most maxima
developers can't be all that interested in this code since it is
unmaintained. And then you might have a newbie like myself who might be
interested in something like this. Having quick experimental releases here
is helpful. But I wouldn't want commit access to maxima, lest I do
inadvertent damage; and you might feel the same way.


On Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 1:26 AM, Robert Dodier <rob...@gm...>
wrote:

> Rocky,
>
> I don't know anything about the Elisp code. I do know that it is
> unmaintained at present. If you have patches you want to contribute,
> feel free to post them to the mailing list or open a bug report and
> attach them or something like that. Good luck, and thanks for your
> interest in Maxima.
>
> best,
>
> Robert Dodier
>