Subject: On broken wheels and user contributed code
From: Harald Geyer
Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 00:41:24 +0200
Hi!
In the past few weeks there were several code snippets posted to
this ML which finally did not get included into maxima for various
reasons. It has been suggeted to archive that code on the wiki, but
that solution seems somewhat impractical.
While it is great so see that maxima is gaining momentum lately it
also indicates some lack of infrastructure. I guess the time for some
kind of comprehensive maxima archive network isn't here yet and I
don't like the suggestion unhappy users should fork the project either.
What I believe would be a proper solution is to start a new project
maxima_contributed_code (hosted either on sourceforge or somewhere
else) which has less strict write access rules. That project would
collect code not part of "original maxima" and release it in some form
that can be dropped somewhere in the share directory of a typical maxima
installation without disrupting the core maxima. Perhaps Ziga is willing
to take the job of setting up the project and doing the basic
administration tasks like giving people write access and maintaining
the releases?
On a technical note: IIRC maxima recently switched the package load
infrasructure from static list of pathes to dynamic searching. Maybe
some tweaks to exclude the contributed_code directory from automatic
searching would help to avoid namespace conflicts. I'm sure something
like that can easily be set up. Perhaps .../share/uc/ would be an apt
prefix.
On the specific issue of $table: I don't think multiple facilities which
provide the some functionality are a bad thing per se as long as all
but one of them are clearly marked as deprecated in the documentation.
HTH,
Harald