Fork of maxima for make it more embeddable.

On 1/7/12 1:16 PM, Robert Dodier wrote:
> About your project to create a Quicklisp-able Maxima, I think that
> is a valuable goal, and I'm 100% in favor of you (or anyone)
> creating their own projects based on Maxima. That said, since
> you have changed the build system a lot, I am hesitant to
> merge those changes into Maxima. I am no big fan of defsystem,
> but changing the build system could affect people who are
> building packages or installations.
I haven't tried it, but I think using asdf instead of defsystem to build
maxima shouldn't be very hard.  Switching the existing defsystems to
asdf shouldn't be too hard either since the basic syntax is pretty much
compatible.

The main issue is if asdf will work with gcl.   We still build maxima
with gcl, right?  That would be a show stopper.
>
> If you want to try  (or not, that's OK too) to convince me & other
> developers to merge in your changes, perhaps you can describe
> how the build machinery will work. I can't guarantee that we'll accept it,
> but I am interested to hear about it.
>
I don't understand why we would need to change the maxima.asd we already
have.  That should work to build maxima.

Oh, there is one hairy issue.  If you notice, make will compile maxima
and then reload it all again into a fresh image before saving the
image.  I think James had to do this long ago because of some issues
with compile and load order.  We haven't been very good about having
things defined before they are used.  And there used to be issues with
different files defining the same function with slightly different
behaviors.  Don't know if those exist or not anymore.

Ray