I have spent the last couple of evenings trying to build maxima under
windows. I don't know much about lisp, but I have built a lot of unix based
packages on a PC using gcc. Unfortunately I left a couple of pages of notes
at home, so this is incomplete. Hopefully something is better than nothing.
The windows binary on http://www.ma.utexas.edu/ is maxima-5.5, and is
missing a number of lisp files. It was built in early December 2000.
The tarball also contains a mingw binary of gcc-2.95.2, which is missing a
number of startup files. There is enough gcc to compile an object file, but
not enough to link an executable.
I started by trying to build gcl-2.4.0. There are some notes in
readme.mingw. I already have the current cygwin (http://cygwin.com) and
mingw (http:/www.mingw.org) installed. My first attempt, using mingw gcc
under bash, failed as the configure process set up a number of cygwin
symbolic links that the mingw gcc couldn't understand. I made much more
progress using the cygwin gcc as a cross compiler to generate a mingw binary
using the -mno-cygwin option. This required some hacking of the makefiles
and configuration files. The end result is a raw_gsl.exe binary that fails
on startup with
GCL (GNU Common Lisp) April 1994 32768 pages
Unrecoverable error: NULL_OR_ON_C_STACK macro invalid.
The same problems occur with my build of gcl-2.3.8-beta3. I started to debug
this, but then put it aside.
On a different track, I tried compiling with clisp-2.27, using the method
given in http://mathshield.sourceforge.net/maximadoc.pdf. This fails with
Compilation of file C:\junk\maxima-cvs\src\numerm.lisp is finished.
0 errors, 0 warnings
End compile NUMERM at Wed Oct 24 11:27:06 2001
;; Loading file numerm.fas ...
;; Loading of file numerm.fas is finished.
;; Loading file SYS-PROCLAIM.lisp ...
*** - There is no package with name "SERROR"
Bye.
I'd welcome any comments. I guess I would prefer to get things working with
clisp, rather than try and support gcl.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
(Mr) David Billinghurst
Comalco Research Centre
PO Box 316, Thomastown, Vic, Australia, 3074
Phone: +61 3 9469 0642
FAX: +61 3 9462 2700
Email: David.Billinghurst@riotinto.com