Hi Mike,
I agree with most of your points.
The bare maxima.exe didn't work for me from the command line, unless:
- you have -eval (run) on the command line
- the compiled in paths are correct,
so I didn't move it. Can this be fixed with a suitable init file?
Any maxima or maxima.bat file in the same directory as xmaxima.exe
is used as the default maxima. These caused some errors, so I made the
xmaxima subdirectory as a work around. It should go.
I forgot to add tclpip93.dll and a max.ico to the stuff I packaged.
An oversight.
xmaxima should set MAXIMA_PREFIX if the distribution has been moved.
All the path information should be updated. This seems to work if
I set it before running xmaxima.
Which scripts use bash? The maxima script does on cygwin, as /bin/sh
doesn't support getopts, but this should be set by configure.
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Clarkson [mailto:mike at python]
Sent: Thursday, 12 September 2002 7:02
To: Billinghurst, David (CRTS)
Cc: maxima@www.ma.utexas.edu
Subject: RE: maxima.exe on the path
> Good point. I don't like the way the windows distribution is arranged.
> All I have used at present is the standard unix layout, with
> --prefix=something.
Is there any reason maxima.exe is 4 levels down in lib? It works in bin.
Can it not get moved to bin/? I checked in code to look for it in
both places, so your batch file should no longer be needed, but
the code looking for it in lib/.../.../.../ is a hack.
Could I beseech that we move away from the Unix habit of extensionless
shell scripts and ask that we use .sh for shell scripts. Then xmaxima.sh
and xmaxima.exe could coexist in bin/ and although it's 3 letters more
typing, everyone uses <TAB> completion anyway. I helps make cross-platform
symettries more obvious, and makes it much easier to edit under Windows.
I think your current distribution xmaxima/ toplevel directory can get
merged into bin/ and eliminated - xmaxima figures out where it's datadir is,
and there may be other front ends than xmaxima in the future.
In the windows distribution, could you add the tclpip93.dll and a max.ico
from the old 5.5 distribution to the bin/ directory with xmaxima.exe?
xmaxima is now relocatable; maxima can be moved under windows after it
has been installed. When it starts maxima, is there anything you would
like xmaxima to tell maxima? Presumably it could reset all of the
defparameters that got set by autoconf, which are likely to be wrong.
It still can't stand spaces in the directory filenames - it won't soon.
Many thanks for the build and packaging - it's great to have a working
distribution.
Mike.
PS: Is there any reason we use bash for the maxima script (it won't
run under /bin/sh)? Does that mean users on HPs etc. to have to
install bash to run maxima?