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

On 2/8/07, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> 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.

The quality of share/contrib, like the rest of share, varies widely.
share/contrib/numericalio and share/contrib/stringproc have active
maintainers and their quality isn't any worse than stuff outside of
share/contrib. They haven't been moved out of share/contrib
only because it's a bother to fix up cvs, Makefiles, etc.

Robert