imaxima announcements



Hi Robert san,

On 2008/01/08, at 13:31, Robert Dodier wrote:

>> Today or tomorrow, I will announce 0.99, which maintains some
>> documentation. It would be nice if you can import this package.
>
> OK, no problem, I'll import 0.99.

Thanks!

>>> I will import only imaxima, not breqn. I am a little bit worried  
>>> about
>>> importing breqn, so I will assume breqn is separate from Maxima,
>>> unless someone wants to convince me otherwise.
>>
>> Do you have any specific issues / concerns regarding the possible
>> inclusion of breqn package into Maxima?
>
> Well, the problems that I see are that it is fairly large (approx 1  
> M),
> it is under development, it can be used independently of Maxima,
> and it is part of a system (LaTeX) which has its own installation  
> process.
> breqn really seems like something which wants to be installed  
> separately.
>
> How much work is it to get breqn installed? If it is something  
> comparable
> to yum or apt-get or getting Perl stuff from CPAN then I would say  
> that
> suggests we don't need to include it with Maxima.

I didn't notice the issue of the size! The reason it is large is that  
it includes
documents in PDF. I created an absolute minimum package based on  
breqn097a
as an experiment, and its size is 36KB.
For the legal reason, I may need to include *.dtx files. Adding *.dtx  
to the zip
archive makes the size of the archive 122KB.
What do you think, 122KB is acceptable talking about the size? 36KB?

As for the installation process, today, no TeX system includes breqn  
package
for the unknown copyright status issue. I hope they include breqn soon.
Also, many linux distributions contain tex distributions, but not  
always up to
date. So I think there are a lot of chances for end users to install  
tex system
without breqn packages for a year or two.

Looking at CTAN quickly, it seems they do not provide any package  
installation
service.

So, until breqn is incorporated widely in tex systems, I would prefer  
to distribute
it with imaxima, and hopefully maxima if it includes imaxima.

I will ask Morten if either 36KB or 122KB packages are OK to  
distribute, from
license point of view.

Yasuaki Honda, Chiba, Japan