todo for beta 2



On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 17:27, Raymond Toy wrote:

>     James> 4) Add documentation for new plotting routines.
>     James>       -I was somehow convinced that I had already done this, but
>     James> obviously I have not. Most of the necessary information is on the demo
>     James> web page I created.
> 
> Would be nice if the log plots could do something than setting the
> gnuplot preamble string.  

I'm not sure what you meant. Did you mean that you would like to add a
log scale option to plot? We could do that, but I'm afraid of the
slippery slope -- there are a million options available through the
gnuplot_preamble command. If we start making some of them real plot
options, where do we stop? I'm more comfortable with the level of
wrapping we have right now: minimal.

I don't think the plot routines are done forever -- not even close. I do
think what we have is a reasonable plateau, however.

>     James> 5) Apply the compilation-warning-reducing patches from Andreas Eder.
>     James> Andreas has sent me a set of changes that dramatically reduce the number
>     James> of compiler warnings in a maxima compile. I think this is very important
>     James> work. We should be very grateful for it. Since it is a large patch,
> 
> Is this something you really want to do for an imminent release?

Oh, maybe not. I've had a fever off and on for a week. It may be
clouding my judgment. The plan for the next release was to do downcasing
and nothing else. The patches will be hard to apply after downcasing. I
have been privately debating about when to apply these patches for days.

My mind can still be changed.
 
>     James> however, I would like to see at least one pair of eyeballs go over it
>     James> before it goes in. I would also like to see testing on gcl, cmucl and
>     James> clisp. If you would like to volunteer to look at the changes, please
>     James> contact me and I will send you the changes. (It's a ~400k tarball.)
> 
> Assuming you want this for the release, you can send it to me at this
> address.  Or better yet, put it on some ftp site or something for
> people to grab.

I put the tarball on the maxima web site for the time being. It is
available at <http://maxima.sourceforge.net/tmp/changed_src.tgz>;. I
welcome others opinions about applying these patches now or later. In
the end, I think that applying these changes is important -- it's more
than mere cosmetics.

--Jim