Maxima 5.18.1 Mac OS X



OK I have recompiled wxWidgets and wxMaxima, so it shouldn't use  
system's libpng. I have reuploaded .dmg. Only wxMaxima.app was changed.

Could you please download again and try if wxMaxima.app works this time?

Also I was thinking when making this Mac release - on a mac, Maxima,  
wxMaxima, gnuplot could happily coexist in a single .app (which would  
improve simplicity and portability). However an interesting question  
then is, how do you name .app and how do you count versions.

It seems that wxMaxima and Maxima releases are synchronus - both get  
new releases 3 times per year normally. Both also don't have any  
roadmap or goals for next version numbers (like Maxima 6.0 or  
wxMaxima 1.0) ... Constantly increasing a minor version number is  
thus in fact a nonsense.

I thought Maxima would go through bigger changes - like renaming all  
the functions in a coherent way (like Mathematica), but it seems  
community is against it - so there really is no "incompatible" change  
which would cause a major version number increase to Maxima 6.0.

Thus from a regular users point of view, version numbers would be  
much more useful if they meant something, like Ubuntu's system or  
MATLAB 2008a releases. Then wxMaxima and Maxima could also use the  
same version numbers and it would be less confusing for a regular  
user. I prefer 2009a, 2009b and 2009c releases to Ubuntu's 9.4 9.8  
9.12, but both would be better than current version scheme. With no  
roadmap, this versioning scheme only serves to confuse the user, as  
he thinks there is little difference between 5.18 and 5.9, or that  
5.18 is older than 5.9 or that 6.0 is coming soon.

Ziga