I need help with xmaxima, particularly on windows

I'm not sure about these other prospects, but my understanding
of xmaxima is:
you download a file
and you click "install"
and it works, with a user interface.

Until and unless you have something better on ALL
counts, you had better keep it around.  Anything
that starts out by suggesting you must download
various other things, is nearly worthless in
the real world.

xmaxima does not need more investment as far as I
can tell. Just don't break it.



C Y wrote:

>--- 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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