I need help with xmaxima, particularly on windows

--- Stavros Macrakis <stavros.macrakis@verizon.net> wrote:
> > If there is some love for xmaxima out there, now would be the 
> > time to say so.
> 
> Command line (running under Emacs) is OK for me except for one
> (important!) thing: there is no way to interrupt an infinite loop in
> Emacs shell windows as far as I know.  I assume plotting would
> continue to work in separate windows.

I'm personally of the opinion that xmaxima is not worth continued time
and investment.  I'd say the best thing to do at this point would be to
make sure Maxima runs well using the emacs mode on both Windows and
Linux, and go with that until we produce a good GUI.  (BTW Jay, does
the emacs package simplify with the new changes that have been added?)

This leaves us with the question of what to do for the installable
package on Windows.  Here are my thoughts (for whatever they're worth)

a)  Have the .exe package work with only command line.  This seems like
asking for trouble to me - xmaxima isn't great, but people do have the
option to save txt files of their sessions, which is much better than
nothing.  Command line control isn't going to appeal to them, and my
concern is we might wind up with a lot of people continuing to use
5.9.0.  Not good for bug reporting and testing purposes.  Of course,
this is the default easiest position to fall back on if need be.

b)  Advise people to install emacs, and then put the emacs files
associated with Maxima in whatever directory is appropriate on Windows
and have the default icon call up an emacs maxima session. More work
for the end user, but at least they would have the ability to save
files.

c)  We bundle emacs and maxima (maybe gnuplot too, if that's
technically and legally workable) into one self contained installer,
with all the files in the right places.  I don't know how tricky this
is, but it would have the very distinct advantage of giving us a clean,
self contained package with minimal effort on the part of the end user.
 A rather large package granted, but we can always bundle things with
just the command line version if people need a smaller download.  I
don't have a Windows box at my fingertips, so I can't say exactly what
we could do, but here's my reasoning:

According to this page: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~alee/emacs/emacs.html
it's possible to install emacs on Windows 95/98/2K/NT/ME/XP.  It looks
like the emacs tarball is about 8 megs.  (We might be able to trim out
a fair bit of that for a special purpose application like this, but I
don't know how flexible it is.)  We install our emacs into the maxima
directory, along with all the config files and such needed to make it
work.  Then, to launch maxima, we have our icon linked to a script that
sets whatever variables it needs to and launches emacs with a maxima
session in it.

It's been a long time since I made any attempts at maxima in emacs on
windows, but if we can pull it off we get three major advantages:  1) 
we solve any issues with emacs mode on Windows, something worth doing
anyway 2) people using Maxima on Windows would be continually helping
us to debug the emacs mode, which unlike xmaxima is likely to be here
for the duration, and 3) we don't have Windows GUI oriented folk
totally at sea in a DOS command prompt.  Drawbacks are 1) it could be
tricky  and 2) it is a larger download size.  2) I'm not so worried
about with modern internet and computers - 1) I can't evaluate yet.

Anyway, a complete self contained installer is about the only way I can
think of right now for us to ditch xmaxima (yay!) and still provide a
reasonably smooth user experience that we can expect people to upgrade
to.  We can have other packages for special cases (like if someone
already has emacs installed, for example) but for most people I think
this is the way to go.

I guess that doesn't help you much though Jim :-/.  One point we should
definitely think about, regardless of the above, is gnuplot - if that
is  going to become our default plotter we need to think about
including it by default in the Windows package.

Thanks for all your hard work!

CY

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