mk:defsystem for maxima




Hi, 

(Let me apologize: I don't necessarily think clocc-devel is the
appropriate list for this message. The conversation started here,
however, so I am continuing it here. Please redirect the conversation as
you see fit. I'm cc'ing the Maxima list for obvious reasons.) 

As I said before on the Maxima mailing list, I think that the future
direction for Maxima should be toward ANSI-CL and away from GCL
idiosyncrasies. To that end, I have a version of Maxima that builds
consistently with CLISP, CMUCL and GCL using mk:defsystem from CLOCC.
Much of what I have is derived from work done by Liam Healy, who
deserves most of the credit and none of the blame.

Building requires defsystem.lisp from CLOCC and (for the time being) my
patched version of CLOCC's run-lisp, which I have included.
To build with clisp:
	make
To build with CMUCL:
	make L=cmucl
To build with gcl
	make L=gcl

The Makefile is a temporary hack; I plan to setup an autoconf/automake
system for maxima so that it can be configured, built and installed in a
way familiar to users of other autoconf'ed projects. The lisp part will
continue to actually be built by mk:defsystem.

I also plan to write a wrapper script so that maxima can be invoked from
the command line in a manner independent of lisp implementation.

I'm sending this message now not because I have a polished final product
ready, but because I hope others will be interested in discussing and
working on it.

The differences between what I have and the current head of the maxima
cvs repository are quite small. I've appended the diff. Please let me
know if you would like a copy of the modified files.

--Jim Amundson

Attached file: maxima-ng.diff