--- TenThumbs <tenthumbs@cybernex.net> wrote:
> 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.
cmucl is probably a poor choice for a compile only install in any case
- I've never figured it out. I believe you need cmucl installed to
compile cmucl.
> 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.
What errors did it report? Compiler not found?
> 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.
Um. Did you check the gcl site? http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gcl
That's where the gcl cvs tree is hosted, module name gcl is the current
development branch.
> Personally, I would be quite happy if enough of a lisp were bundled
> into the maxima package so I could just build one thing.
We might consider something like that for a major stable release, but
as a rule it's much simpler to keep the lisp as its own package, since
clisp, gcl and maxima are all being actively developed by different
teams.
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