Building maxima 5.9.0rc3 on Linux



On Mon, 4 Nov 2002, C Y wrote:

>
> > 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?
>

No. The INSTALL file clearly says I can set such things as CC and CFLAGS
in the environment before configuring. That works for essentially all
autoconf builds. It appears to work for for clisp but after a while the
clisp build tries to re-run configure which then barfs about "gcc" not
being the same as the CC I chose. I currently have four gcc versions
available and I wanted to try gcc3.2 which is definitely not the
default version.

>
> 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.
>

Indeed. Maybe I'm stupid but I can't find the definition of the module
name anywhere there.

OK, I tried that and it sort of works. However cvs objects strenuously
to updating a gcl 2.4.3 tarball. Cvs is also way to slow to download the
entire package.

>
> 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.
>

I always prefer self-contained packages. I've run into the problem of
having package A depend on package B but no on the newer version of
package B which requires re-building package A.

I do have a list of possible maxima bugs but I guess I'll wait until
there's a reasonable gcl avaiable.

Thanks for replying.