Jose Capco <jcapco at yahoo.com> writes:
> Hi,
>
> I want to know more about the development team of maxima. How do
> contributers get involved in maxima? Do they just send code to the
> main development team and then after review the team integrate it in
> the software or do they just invite a new skilled person to the
> development team to contribute to the code. I also want to know about
> building maxima. Can I just download the source code from git and
> build it? Are there any documentations on how to build the software?
>
> Jose
I don't know if I'm typical of the people that are working on Maxima
code, but I'm probably one of the newest so maybe my experiences will
help: I first found Maxima when I was in my 3rd year of university. I
was enthusiastic about the whole free software thing and about computer
algebra systems in general (a maths undergraduate), so I decided to
learn more about how it all worked. To do so, I taught myself Common
Lisp, in which Maxima is written, and (several years later) started
fixing the occasional bug. For some time, I would post proposed bug
fixes as patches to the bug tracker and ask questions here. Mostly my
"solutions" turned out to be horribly wrong, but (I hope) nowadays I'm
starting to understand how Maxima actually works. Sometime near the
start of this year, I got invited by Robert (the project
leader/administrator) to start committing to the repository.
To build Maxima, yep, you can just download it and type "./bootstrap;
make". I would suggest building with SBCL, especially if you want to
poke around with the lisp internals. It seems to be the most robust lisp
implementation. So maybe something like:
git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/maxima/code maxima
cd maxima
./bootstrap
./configure --with-sbcl
make
is a good start.
Rupert
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