[Gcl-devel] Maxima Status

[James Amundson]

Hello everyone,

In an effort to finally finish the long-overdue release of 5.9.0, I have
been in self-imposed exile from Maxima-related mail  I apologize to all
of you who haven't heard from me in a while. The exile has (almost)
payed off. I am almost ready with a working windows install. I am down
to one identified bug and one non-critical issue.

The bug: When compiled with GCL, Maxima barfs when any of its internal
paths contain spaces. The easiest way to see this is to do

----------------------------------------------------------------
|abacus>export HOME="/tmp/with spaces"
|abacus>maxima -l gcl
GCL (GNU Common Lisp)  Version(2.5.0) Wed Oct  9 15:13:53 EDT 2002
Licensed under GNU Library General Public License
Contains Enhancements by W. Schelter
Maxima 5.9.0rc3 http://maxima.sourceforge.net
Distributed under the GNU Public License. See the file COPYING.
Dedicated to the memory of William Schelter.
This is a development version of Maxima. The function bug_report()
provides bug reporting information.
Bad file spec: ?\/tmp\/with\ spaces\/\.maxima\/\#\#\#\.\{o\,lisp\,lsp\}
 -- an error.  Quitting.  To debug this try DEBUGMODE(TRUE);)
|abacus>
----------------------------------------------------------------

Maxima dies because it uses "$HOME/.maxima" by default. The problem does
not appear with either clisp or cmucl. It could either be a GCL-specific
problem in Maxima or a bug in GCL. I do not yet know.

The bug is a show-stopper under Windows because my HOME is "c:\Documents
and Settings\amundson" (or something like that). It will be a problem
for most users.

The non-critical issue: I don't know how to get InnoSetup to use the new
Maxima icon. I will confess I haven't tried very hard yet. Any advice
will be appreciated.

I should be able to check in the changes needed for a (relatively)
simple windows build including packaging soon.

--Jim

-- 
James Amundson <address@hidden>