on 3/19/06 8:29 PM, Robert Dodier at robert.dodier at gmail.com wrote:
> hello joe,
>
>> For what it is worth, maxima-5.9.3 built without problems on my Mac
>> with OS X 10.3.9 and Xcode Tools 1.5.
>
> thanks for the good news. if you have the time maybe you
> can put a note on the maxima ports page,
> http://maxima.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Maxima%20ports .
>
> by the way, can you create some kind of binary installation
> package? that would be really helpful. if so, you could just
> link to it from the ports page, or we could put in the SF
> file manager (and link to it from the ports page).
>
Robert,
My recommendation would be to provide a link on the maxima site to the
DarwinPorts website. They currently have clisp-2.38 and maxima-5.9.2
available for the Mac. If there are problems, they have a mail list to
answer questions. Fink is another option, but I don't know what versions are
currently available there. The nice thing about both of these sites is that
they take care of the dependencies for those who don't know what to do.
Often these sites take the about same amount of time as a build-from-source,
because they often actually build from a CVS-type source rather than just
install binaries.
The top form of binary installer on the Mac is the disk image (.dmg) file,
which most Mac users encounter regularly. To create a .dmg requires more
developer type knowledge than I have now, and given that clisp, maxima, etc.
are under active development, keeping such an installer current would be
difficult. An alternative simple installer would be to develop a binary
installer of the type Guarav Khanna uses for his hpc.sourceforge.net.
Basically, he uses the tar utility to copy the necessary binary files from a
.tar file into /usr/local. It works well, for example, for octave, but
doesn't do dependencies. Creating such a .tar and the instructions would not
be too difficult, but it should be done on the latest Apple machines, with
perhaps different versions for different versions of OS X and now different
processors (IBM PowerPC vs. Intel Pentium).
Compared to some other open source applications, clisp and maxima are
relatively easy to build on a Mac. I could do a wiki page on how to do it,
but my OS X is a bit out of date, and Apple keeps tweaking gcc, libraries,
etc., because that's what Apple uses to build OS X. I'm not sure that any
directions that I would post now would work correctly for OS X 10.4.x. Let's
just say that I'm willing to watch the maxima list and help, if I can, those
hardy individuals that want to build maxima from scratch.
Another aid would be to feedback more Mac-specific build comments to the
folks that maintain the maxima make files. I realize that an increase in Mac
usage would certainly help provide some motivation for that.
It's a sticky problem, and I wish I had an easy answer. I don't think Apple
will help too much, because they don't want to endanger their relations with
commercial software developers, even though their entire OS is based on open
source software.
My two cents.
Joe
> if you want to put it in the SF file manager, just ftp upload.sf.net
> (login = anonymous, password = email address),
> cd incoming, set binary mode, put the package there,
> and let me know about it.
>
> (same thing goes for installation files for other systems as well.)
>
> all the best,
> robert dodier