the "dynamics" package and numerical solution of DEs

On Sun, 2007-01-21 at 16:01 -0800, Daniel Lakeland wrote:
> The first thing you should do is get a relatively up to date
> maxima. 5.10.0 at least. If you're running Debian, that's what's in
> the "testing" or "unstable" distribution.
I've just installed maxima 5.10 in Debian testing to see what's
going on.
I've noticed that the Debian package has a error: it should depend on:
 libgmp3c2
if you do not have that package installed, maxima will not start.

> If you're running Debian, you'll also need the "maxima-share" package
> which has all the "non-core" maxima stuff. I'm not sure why the Debian
> packager does this, but I think it's a debian policy to split out
> "nonessential" portions of packages...
That's right. But the definition of what's essential for a package
is left to the package maintainer. In this case, Camm Maguire thinks gcl
is essential (there are no cmucl, sbcl or clisp versions) but share
is not. If I were the maintainer I would pack share into maxima-common
and leave the gcl executable into a dependency of the form
maxima-gcl | maxima-sbcl | maxima-cmucl | maxima-clisp 

> This might be a reason why it doesn't find the "dynamics" package,
> because you will need to "load(dynamics);" before getting rk.
right.

> "? rk" is supposed to give you info on how to use the runge-kutta ODE
> integrator. It works for me on windows, but on Debian it doesn't find
> the docs 
describe (and the equivalent ? operator) will not work unless you also
install maxima-doc, which is not even recommended but just suggested.
The info files come in the maxima-doc package.

There are other problems with the maxima package in Debian testing
(5.10). It depends on gnuplot-nox, but even with that package one
will not get any plots unless X is installed and Maxima is run
from an X console (which is not among the dependencies).

Regards,
Jaime