Maxima 5.11 release candidate 1



Hi Jaime,
  1. Is the menu item in 5.11? I can't find it in 5.10.

  2. I have had trouble with the rpm archive.

     I am running Fedora Core 4, and the archive is built with an
     earlier one.  I haven't tried the rpm's since 5.9.3 because there
     were dependency conflicts since my libraries were somewhat
     different from the older ones.

      I found that, if I wanted to install several different versions
     of maxima at the same time (testing the newer ones, and using the
     older ones with code that works with them), it is easier to use
     the sources.

      I can easily put, say 5.9.3 in one directory, 5.10.0 in another,
     and give them different names.  That is, of course, possible with
     the rpms, but too painful to bother with.

      So, I would still ask that the html files be included in the
     *tar.gz source.  Again, why not make two:

       maxima-5.11.0-src-no-html.tar.gz
       maxima-5.11.0-src-with-html.tar.gz

     Of course, users of the sources can do this by themselves, but
     how much is to be gained or lost with removing the html's?

  3. Maybe a way to avoid the dependency issues with different OS's, is
     to include a spec file with the source (*.tar.gz) file so people
     can make their own packages.  I was told that this is already
     possible with Ubuntu (maybe Debian), but I don't know if it is
     possible with Fedora.

Since this is, in part, to Jaime, I want to say something about
plotting.

  A. I like Jaime's "graph2d" but it would really be nice if one could
     add all of the gnuplot options as in the case of plot2d.  For
     instance, I would really like "fig" output, so I can add text,
     drawings, etc.

     Incidentally, I noticed that using the gnuplot option
      "linetype  -n" with many
       different numbers gives one many colors in plot2d.
     It would be good to have this in "graph2d"

     I tried openplot_curves, but there is little documentation. Can
     one add all of the gnuplot options there?

  5. I really appreciate the work all of you guys are doing, so please
     don't take my comments, suggestions as criticism.


-sen

On Fri, 8 Dec 2006, Jaime E. Villate wrote:

> On Fri, 2006-12-08 at 12:18 -0500, sen1 at math.msu.edu wrote:
>> I use the html versions a lot.  They are much easier to search through
>> that the info files.  For instance, one can easily set up a simple
>> command to load the html files from within maxima using an external
>> browser.  That allows the searching through the pages with the browser
>> (e.g. firefox, or whatever).
>
> Sure, I also use the html pages all they time. I'm not proposing to
> remove them from the rpm files or from the windows installer. What
> I'm proposing is to remove them from the archive that has the
> source code.
> By the way, as you proposed some time ago, xmaxima now has a menu
> option that will open the html manual in your web browser.
> Best regards,
> Jaime
>
>

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