Just to clarify my request (which should also make it simpler):
Actually, I myself don't care so much about the general distinction
between "local" and "system".
My problem is just, that as part of my library, I install (and use)
Maxima. And I just want to do my best that my library "doesn't leak",
that is, nothing outside of its directory is changed, and once that
library-directory is deleted, nothing remains.
So when I install Maxima (as part of the installation of my library),
then yet I just specify prefix as a certain local directory inside
the library directory.
Now, whatever you do, hopefully I will have the possibility, perhaps
with another installation-option, to make sure that everything Maxima
will do (that is, "under the cover") will stay inside that specified
installation directory.
Hope this can be done.
Oliver
On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 02:34:25PM -0500, Raymond Toy wrote:
> Robert Dodier wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Raymond Toy <raymond.toy at ericsson.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >> For the second item about installation directories, I guess the user
> >> (superuser) could set maxima_userdir to be the appropriate place.
> >> Or maybe we want a new variable, *maxima-objdir* (maxima_objdir) to
> >> specify where fasls should go?
> >>
> >
> > I can see that another special variable could be useful here,
> > although I'm not sure we want to make this situation even more complicated ...
> >
> >
> How about this (after just a minute of thinking)? First, I do not know
> how to distinguish a local install versus a system install (as wanted by
> Oliver). However, when I want the system installation, I always run
> maxima. For a "local" install, I run maxima-local. If that's good
> enough to distinguish between a local and system install, then the
> following might be an option.
>
> New environment variable MAXIMA_OBJDIR. In maxima, this is unset. In
> maxima-local this is set to maxima userdir.
>
> On startup, maxima looks at these and sets *maxima-objdir*
> appropriately, and the function maxima-objdir-path returns the
> appropriate string (Lisp pathname?) for defsystem to use for storing fasls.
>
> I haven't tried to implement this so I don't know if this will work or not.
>
> Ray
>
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--
Dr. Oliver Kullmann
Computer Science Department
Swansea University
Faraday Building, Singleton Park
Swansea SA2 8PP, UK
http://cs.swan.ac.uk/~csoliver/