On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, C Y wrote:
> 1) Tutorial/Users Manual
Yes, I agree completely with this what you said. A good starting point
is the intro.html "Maxima Primer", that comes at least with Maxima 5.6.
> 2) The Reference Manual
Yes, and in addition I suggest that it'll be kept in one language.
I don't have anything particular against French, but nevertheless
I hope that the French parts will be translated into English. The
original French text should probably be saved anyway, if someone
will make make a full French version of the manual someday.
Look for example documentation of functions CONT2PART, CONT2PUI.
Furthermore, these functions didn't seem to work. If it requires
that something is load()'ed before, this should be mentioned in the manual.
>Question 2: What do we use?
I myself would like to have a LaTeX documentation. Although the
Maxima commands itself are text-based, it would probably help
people to see the corresponding things written in standard math
notations.
The GNU standards use info, but I don't like it =)
>Question 3: Documentation's relation to Maxima updates
Maybe there should be two kinds of releases: stable and development.
With stable releases everything should be perfect, including the
documentation. With development releases it wouldn't matter so much.
The stable release should be the target, so that even if some piece
doesn't have documentation, it at least would be on the list of
things-to-do.
Lots of talk, little deed. Sorry. I'd like to help but I can't
preallocate any fixed amount of my time to the work. And worse,
I don't understand Maxima or computer algebra systems much anyway.
But if there's something easy to do, and no better people for the task,
let me know :)
I'm very happy that there seems to be very skillful people going
to sacrifice their time to Maxima. Thank you all.
--
| Tuukka Toivonen <tuukkat@ee.oulu.fi> [PGP public key
| Homepage: http://www.ee.oulu.fi/~tuukkat/ available]
| Try also finger -l tuukkat@ee.oulu.fi
| Studying information engineering at the University of Oulu
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