Well it turned out to be a disaster.
I care about maxima. I don't care about lisp or anything else. I've also
been burned in the past by bad binary packages so I only trust binaries
from my distribution's cdroms. I build everything else from source. So
the first thing I had to do is build a lisp.
I looked at cmucl but it doesn't provide any guidance on how to build
it. It also says it's incompatible with libsafe. Since I'm not going to
relax my security precautions, cmucl's out.
Next I tried clisp. It's an autoconf build and it's own documentation
says I can select the compiler of my choice. That doesn't work. I gave
up after three different attempts. As far as I'm concerned any package
that doesn't follow its own documentation isn't worth using.
Which leaves gcl. Now I do read docs so I know you need a 2.5.0 source.
The maxima web site tells me how to use cvs (which I already know) but
also tells me I have to specify a module name. Too bad the site doesn't
tell me what the name is. I tried "cvs co -c" to see the database but
nothing happens. So I looked at the gnu ftp site. There are plenty of
binaries but no source snapshot.
I gave up. A wasted evening.
Personally, I would be quite happy if enough of a lisp were bundled into
the maxima package so I could just build one thing.