Hi!
I'd like to report that Maxima i18 framework
for describe and HTML documentation is mostly
finished:
(1) Building of Spanish and Portuguese documentation
is activated by configure options --enable-lang-es and
--enable-lang-pt.
(2) On Windows and as rpm Spanish and Portuguese
documentation (.info and .html) is packaged as additional
language packs. These .info and .html documentation are
installed into /es and /pt subdirectories of standard
.info and .html installation directories (here English
documentation resides).
(3) Maxima automatically set *maxima-lang-subdir* to
"es" or "pt" using current user's locale (environment
variable MAXIMA_LANG_SUBDIR overrides it). And if
*maxima-lang-subdir* is not nil then describe first
tries to find documentation in this subdirectory
and only if no docs found here tries standard English
.info. Analogously xmaxima menu item "Maxima Help"
shows Spanish or Portuguese .html depending on
current locale setting.
Known problems:
(a) Command line Maxima is not locale-aware.
Helper program to set environment variable is required
but at present one can set MAXIMA_LANG_SUBDIR manually.
(b) With CLISP and SBCL describe causes error with
Spanish and Portuguese .info. This is precisely the same
problem as was observed with building info in non-C
locale. It looks like cl-info.lisp on these lisps
doesn't like any non-ASCII characters. Probably
cl-info urgently require some fix. More details
on the problem later.
(c) With GCL and CMUCL i don't see errors but it looks
like describe unable to locate nodes whose names
was installed to Spanish or Portuguese. I'm quite
surprised since this problem was apparently fixed
quite a while ago.
Test Windows build including es and pt language packs
are available at ftp://ftp.altlinux.ru/pub/people/vvz/Maxima.
This build is compiled with patched version of
gcl 2.6.7 (compiler temp dir issue).
On Windows 2000/XP all known Maxima issues seems to
be fixed (1328888, 1356617). Please try.
On Windows 98/Me I still observe problem with compile --
investigating.
Best wishes,
Vadim
--
Vadim V. Zhytnikov
<vvzhy at mail.ru>
<vvzhy at netorn.ru>