Hello,
I have put together a version of Maxima that incorporates cl-ppcre and
a new way of building info indexes, as discussed in December
(http://www.math.utexas.edu/pipermail/maxima/2010/023435.html).
1. info indexes:
Amongst the changes, I have exposed two user-level functions
-setup_help_database &
-print_help_database
The former takes an optional list of master info files; the default
behaviour is to use the default master info file as previously. The
latter prints out a lisp file of the current info hashtables. The
invocation:
setup_help_database(); print_help_database("maxima-index.lisp");
emulates the old build_index.pl script (and is idempotent). This
exposes the opportunity to:
-use multiple master info files (i.e. use documentation in several languages)
-add third party info documentation to the online help
-rebuild+reload the online documentation during a maxima session
By my computations, it takes about 5.5sec to execute
setup_help_database() on an Atom-based netbook with the english info
files; this is about 1/3 the time of the Perl script.
2. I have included a testsuite for this code, but it is not run during
the normal testsuite.
3. I have mirrored Maxima's sourceforge CVS repository on GitHUB. You
can pick up the above code by (install git, then...)
git clone git://github.com/leo-butler/Maxima-CAS.git
git checkout build-index+cl-ppcre
Then build Maxima as you normally would from HEAD.
Alternatively, you can visit the repository at
https://github.com/leo-butler/Maxima-CAS
and peruse the branches there (HEAD=master).
In light of the recent prolonged outage at sourceforge, I'm going to try
to maintain this as a mirror, in addition to using it as a public
scratchpad for
my own stuff.
4. REQUEST: please checkout and test the above code. I am especially
interested in hearing about bugs or feature requests.
At the moment, the code appears to work for me with clisp+cmucl+sbcl,
but it may need tweaking for other lisps, so I am interested in
hearing about how it works on other lisps, too.
Leo
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