I need help with xmaxima, particularly on windows

Hi James.

First, thanks for the work you've put in on this.

| The biggest obstacle to releasing maxima 5.9.1 is xmaxima. In 5.9.0,
| maxima and xmaxima were significantly intertwined. I have now modified
| maxima so that xmaxima can interface to it in a significantly simpler
| way, but I am having trouble working out the kinks on the xmaxima side,
| particularly on windows. I really don't know how to debug a Tcl
| application on windows.

I am not a Tcl expert but perhaps there is something I can do to help.  Can
you please let me know:

1. The details of the problem you are trying to solve and the problems with
debugging you are having.  I can't guarantee anything but without this
information I can't tell.

2. What I need to do to synchronise with your precise state of development,
bearing in mind the problems I have mentioned in the past with CVS updates
from your site which continue (company firewall policy I believe).


| One option at this point is to simply dump xmaxima. In 5.9.0 xmaxima was
| the only real way to get a working maxima on windows. Now, however, we
| have a command-line version of maxima that is independent of any
| unix-emulation utilities. Although I would like to see us have a decent
| GUI frontend for maxima in the future, I think the command-line
| application is the best thing we have right now.
|
| If there is some love for xmaxima out there, now would be the time to
| say so.

I think that Xmaxima, despite it's current flaws is very much a good mock-up
of the direction you should be taking Maxima on Windows.  The two best
examples I can think of to back this up are:

1. The excellent results being obtained by Nikos with his students which I
believe goes to the heart of what open source development is all about, and

2. The web pages on DE's put up by the late Bill Schelter.

>From what I have seen of TeXMacs it is very powerful but I have yet to hear
of it working without an X server on Windows.  Please see my comments on the
support issues invloved with X Servers on Windows in other emails on this
list.

I also think that as a last resort a text based approach is acceptable
provided that the TCL and/or GNUPlot plotting stuff still works.  I have
used both plotting methods from a Maxima text prompt on Windows before with
relatively minor mods previously reported on this list.

Cheers

Mike Thomas.