Robert Dodier writes:
> What is the status of the help system? If it is not working
> at the moment, what can we do to bring it to a working state?
Hi!
To begin with let me once aagin summarize current state
of Maxima .info help system (describe command):
1. Recently it was made locale aware and now it
understand English, Spanish and Portuguese .info
documentation. It works as expected with gcl,
cmucl and sbcl.
2. Unfortunately it doesn't work with clisp.
It appears to be broken on clisp even with
standard English info.
Investigating 2 I presumed that the problem
is caused by i18n modifications. But this is
not the case! Now I'm perfectly confident
that recent describe changes have nothing to
do with describe misbehavior under clisp.
It appears that some clisp/describe problems exist for a
long time but were revealed only by new pieces of
documentation. Here are the facts:
a. describe problem with English is caused by
contrib.info. This info file confuses all
versions of clisp/describe command (it complains
that "Function and Variable Index" can't be found).
contrib.info breaks both current Maxima CVS and
old Maxima 5.9.2 describe commands.
b. Removing contrib.info from Maxima's /info
directory magically cures clisp/describe.
It works well with English and Portuguese
.infos but still have some troubles with
Spanish ones. With Spanish docs describe
is able to find all relevant nodes but when
I select one to see it fails to display the node.
As in the case with "Function and Variable Index"
it fails to locate the position of the node's body.
It appears that something is wrong with
regexp string matcher.
I don't have a fix yet and any help is greatly appreciated.
Best wishes,
Vadim
--
Vadim V. Zhytnikov
<vvzhy at mail.ru>
<vvzhy at netorn.ru>