functions from add-on packages, was: Newbie question: testing for lvalue

>
> I think we can afford to be much more liberal with the autoload
> mechanism. The only reason that I can see to make the user
> explicitly enter load(foo) is to prevent name collisions...


Autoload is an excellent mechanism for loading special-purpose share
packages which don't need to be in the common core.  But I'd think that we
would want to limit this to "official" share packages, not packages in
contrib, which is specifically for packages which are *not* official, that
is, are not necessarily fully consistent with the rest of Maxima, are not
necessarily up to our general quality standards, etc.

Of course, if they deserve to be part of the official share system, let's
promote them after a review period.  Frankly, I ignore the contrib packages
unless I have a specific need, so I have no idea how good they are.

               -s