Hi!
The more close I look at certain pieces of
Maxima texi files the more I'm convinced that
documentation urgently needs serious clean up.
Various inconsistencies are scattered almost
everywhere. Some recent examples. Array.texi is
devoted to arrays and tables. But together with
appropriate stuff it also contains description of
`bashindices' and `getchar'. Both these functions have
absolutely nothing to do with arrays. First must be moved
into section devoted to sum and products.
Situation with getchar is even worse -
it is low level function (strings and symbol names
operations). I don't know where to put getchar's definition.
Furthermore, getchar is broken in Maxima 5.9.1 and loops
forever in current Maxima CVS. I suggest temporary move
definitions of such functions and variables of
unknown status and value into some special file -
something like Unknown.texi. Later they can be either
moved into appropriate section or removed.
There are two files None.texi and xrefs.texi which
are not in use in current documentation. Probably they are
outdated. Shall we move them into archive?
It is hard to update some part of documentation
which describes share packages (e.g. Affine.texi
(share/affine) - now affine is broken and was
broken in 5.9.1). Not to mention Symmetries (share/sym)
which is not only broken but has all docs in French.
I know some French and can translate documentation
but I'm not going to do so without working version of the
package. What we are going to do with all such stuff?
One possible strategy:
1. Move all such sections into special ToDo directory
2. Replace corresponding places in the documentation with
short notes - something like "to be fixed later ..."
3. Restore each piece of documentation as soon as
corresponding functionality is fixed and documentation is
brought up to date.
--
Vadim V. Zhytnikov
<vvzhy@mail.ru>
<vvzhy@netorn.ru>