location for binaries in share .system files

> Hello,
> 
> There are some .system files in share to build some packages
> (affine, sym, lapack). When the user loads one of these packages,
> the .system file directs the compilation of the package.
> 
> I'm wondering what we should do here. Some alternatives:
> 
> (0) Preserve status quo ante. Superuser can always compile
> those packages. Although I don't think that's going to be practical
> on multi-user systems, and it's not very obvious anyway.

I guess this would need to be done at installation time.
It's a matter of size vs. time if one perfers this over (3)

> (1) Point :binary-pathname to *MAXIMA-TEMPDIR*.
> Should be writeable, but default is user's home directory and
> that's not shared among users, and it's probably not so great
> to clutter it. Although Maxima already dumps plotting files there.

Anyone, who lets point this to the real $TEMP of the system
will lose his compiled files on every system boot. I don't
think I like this. I think to dump the plotting files into home
is only useful on terminal-only systems, where you want to
work on them manually...

> (1a) Point :binary-pathname to something shared on *nix
> systems, say /var/maxima-5.foo/binary or something.

That's probably the behaviour most people will expect on Linux.

> (2) Modify .system files to fall back on just loading the package
> files instead of compiling them, if compiling them fails.
> That would probably make some packages take a long time to load;
> I think that's a real problem for lapack. I'm not much worried about
> run time here.
> (3) Compile those share packages and copy compiler output into
> installation rpms or whatever, so user doesn't have to compile them.

I feel this should be the decision of the one doing the packaging, because 
users windows and gentoo have quite different needs ... Therefore I think
it would be nice if some infrastructure for "compile on demand" could
stay in place.

(4) Provide the packagers with some way to change this easily. Debian
perhaps will like to do this anyway if the default doesn't fit their
policy. I don't know what needs to be done for that though.

Regards,
Harald