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Re: [Maxima-discuss] Who is maintaining the emacs lisp code, e.g. dbl.el?
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From: Peter T. <pto...@gm...> - 2017-09-08 15:55:53
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Richard, Totally agree with you here. If the packages are not self-contained and easy to install it is just another barrier to people using the tools. I have a technical background and lots of experience in programming. But let me tell you, recently hopping into these maxima discussions, I am very confused. As with anything a bit out of your own field or expertise there are many references, names, and acronyms that one can't possibly know about without doing a lot of digging. One can't even make the decision of what to download or configure out of the various choices in order to get the whole system working. With Maxima, for example, I am learning there are versions compiled in different ways depending on what version of lisp or something, various interfaces of maxima itself, various front ends and terminal emulators that people use to work with maxima, etc. Wow! At some point it really would be nice to have a simple package one could install and it would just work. Maybe WXMaxima is that solution, but, unfortunately, it doesn't work with a screen reader. Oh well. --Pete -----Original Message----- From: Richard Fateman [mailto:fa...@be...] Sent: Friday, September 8, 2017 9:18 AM To: max...@li... Subject: Re: [Maxima-discuss] Who is maintaining the emacs lisp code, e.g. dbl.el? On 9/7/2017 11:08 PM, Rocky Bernstein wrote: > > Current Emacs practice would be to distribute such code via ELPA or > MELPA . I use Maxima and emacs. I have never heard of elpa or melpa, and neither does my emacs. It appears that it requires emacs 24.1. It appears that I am using 23.1.1. The latest emacs version is 25.2 I suggest that there continue to be an emacs-lisp component in the Maxima distribution. Perhaps it should just link to the elpa etc code somewhere else? Or if elpa requires a newer emacs than the one in use, it should say so. Or perhaps the Maxima distribution should include the maxima-macros, updated, so that someone without internet access could use this; perhaps with an informative message about the latest code being elsewhere. I am personally very much in favor of having Maxima or other programs that I use have self-contained download-and-install packages. When I find that accessing/downloading a program I am instructed to install a sequence of packages (perhaps uninstalling previous versions), disable security safeguards, occasionally rebooting, ... I am discouraged because I know from experience that I can encounter new and disturbing opportunities for failures. So if using some code requires loading (who knows what .. upgrade to windows/cygwin??) upgrade to emacs, upgrade Maxima? I would think twice about it. Do I want to spend several hours to get back to a working system? For the person proposing such changes, it would be courteous for it to be tested and working 100% for all versions of Windows (XP, anyone?) all versions of MAC OS, all versions of UNIX, all Android OS, etc. All versions of Lisp, too. So if there is to be any emacs mode for Maxima, I think it some version should be distributed with Maxima. If there is enough space to have multiple language versions of the documentation and two full lisps (clisp, sbcl), and piles of user-contributed code, this doesn't seem like a space problem. I do not have a problem if someone wants to put together a version of Maxima that is automatically loaded into lisp in pieces via ASDF or something similar. Or even if Maxima is loaded into emacs via elpa. Unless it were entirely perfected, I would not suggest it for a newbie. Summary: I think there must be an easy download/install for any software intended for a wide audience. RJF ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Maxima-discuss mailing list Max...@li... https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/maxima-discuss |
