On Thu, 2009-12-10 at 12:35 -0500, Raymond Toy wrote:
> Recently there have been quite a few bugs reported about maxima not
> working on Ubuntu. AFAICT, these are not maxima issues, but some kind
> of packaging problem in Ubuntu that distributes either a broken gcl or
> a broken prebuild maxima using gcl.
That's right. And the problem extends to Debian too.
> Does anyone here use Ubuntu?
I do; in several machines and several different flavors (Server,
Desktop, Netbook remix, 32bit, 64bit, etc.)
> Can we get Ubuntu to update the package or remove the faulty package?
We should. This is an old problem with several other manifestations: for
instance, broken Maxima installations because the user is not aware that
all share packages and documentation are in separate packages which are
not regarded as essential.
> It does reflect somewhat poorly on maxima itself, even thought it's
> not maxima's fault.
The maintainer of the Debian package, Camm Maguire, is also the
maintainer of the GCL package. He has never built any Debian pacakges
using any other Lisp flavors.
I think it is time we do build our own Debian package, that should work
with several different Lisps, as we do with the rpm's we distribute.
I'm interested in doing some changes to Makefile.am, based on what is
currently done for the RPM's to build our own DEB's. If someone would
like to help, please go ahead. My GPG signature is in the Debian ring,
so I think that if I sign the resulting packages we might manage to get
them into Debian an Ubuntu official repositories. It would be a matter
of coming up with a different name for the package: maxima-upstream?
maxima-cvs? (other suggestions?)
> Or perhaps we can drop support for gcl and recommend
> using something else like ecl. (I'd rather not drop support for gcl,
> but we clearly need help from gcl which seems somewhat lacking now,
> unfortunately.)
Dropping support would not be a good move. We can rather recommend other
versions of Lisp and put GCL in the list of implementations in which
Maxima is not 100% reliable. By the way, I built Maxima in Windows 7
yesterday and it worked very well with the latest version of GCL that I
found for Windows. However, in Ubuntu amd64 I already gave up trying to
make GCL work.
Regards,
Jaime