applying proposed fixes / translating maple code

On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, David Ronis wrote:

> Is this checked into CVS?  If so, I have it already.  Come to think of it, 
> I've been building from CVS, and thus is what I call rc4 the same as what
> the rest are?  I'm using the HEAD tag in updating.

No, you don't have it. James Amundson is doing a good job to make all 
maxima's around the planet equal -- which is a good thing for maintaining 
software, I think.

Therefore, if you really want to apply this patch or others, you have to
edit the file in the maxima/src directory (in this case hayat.lisp) 
yourself and then remake. Unfortunately, it is not an easy exercise to 
find out which bugs are important for your work, nor to find out which 
bugs have a proposed fix. Eg, the simpsum bug

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=625278&group_id=4933&atid=104933

has a proposed fix, but you won't see this on the buglist, 
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=browse&group_id=4933&atid=104933&set=&offset=50

unless you click on the item itself... It might be worth it to browse
through the buglist before you get started. (fixes which are in rc4 should
not appear in the buglist) However, note that all these are PROPOSED
fixes, you have to decide yourself whether it is worth the risk!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 
Also, when reporting a bug, you will have to SAY that
you are using a patched version!!!! 
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Finally, I believe that most if not all of the proposed fixes will find 
there way into the next release (after 5.9.0). I don't know whether you 
can wait so long, though.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

> I'm a theoretical chemist, so math is good part of what I do.  As to
> porting something from maple to maxima, sounds good, but I'd really
> have to learn lisp then, right? :)

I don't know. Currently, it seems to me that lots of the maths of maxima
is written in lisp, but not all. There was some discussion whether this is
good or not, for my part, I like lisp better... In any case it is a good
language to know :-)

However, I think there are two very different approaches to get the 
functionality of, say gdev into maxima: understand the maths and write it 
yourself (maybe it is possible to *improve* the existing code to handle 
the cases in gdev) or more or less blindly translate the maple code to 
maxima. (This is possible, there is even an automatic converter which does 
a lot of the work for you)


All the best,
Martin