Re: maxima 5.14.0

["Chavdar Ivanov" <ci4ic4%gmail.com@localhost>]

On 07/01/2008, Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost> wrote:
>   Hi!

Hello, there,

>
> "Chavdar Ivanov" <ci4ic4%gmail.com@localhost> writes:
>
> > On 06/01/2008, Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost> wrote:
> >> "Chavdar Ivanov" <ci4ic4%gmail.com@localhost> writes:
> >>
> >> > I noticed maxima has been updated to 5.14.0. It would be nice if,
> >> > perhaps using the options framework, one could choose SBCL in place of
> >> > CLISP. It seems SBCL is substantially faster than CLISP, although this
> >> > probably is due to higher memory footprint (which one could argue is
> >> > not as important these days...).

I see similar comment now in sbcl's Makefile...

> >>
> >> I'm working on it in WIP.
>
> I've finished adding option to maxima to build it with SBCL.
> I've sent PR, it's late evening here, and it seems I won't know
> PR number till the morning.

I had a look at the packages, but did not test them, as I already had
the local patches to bootstrap latest sbcl via earlier version; that
is more or less what I was doing before - obviously.
>
> I've created two packages in WIP: sbcl-boot and sbcl,
> when you "make" in sbcl, it bootstraps sbcl-boot (SBCL 1.0.9),
> and builds the most recent SBCL 1.0.13.  You need to "make deinstall"

That's OK. I will try perhaps on some OtherOS(TM) pkgsrc setup (I've
got a couple of virtual machines for that).

> to get rid of bootstrap package,  and then "make install".
>
> With that SBCL from WIP I successfully build and run Maxima
> with its X frontend.

BTW I manually configured and installed tcl/tk 8.5. l couldn't get the
package working (but didn't try harder anyway). Xmaxima works just
fine with it, and you finally get rid of the ugly old TCL font
rendering. The only (minor) problem is that Options/Font dialog
crashes with it, so I have to manually edit .xmaximarc to use some
nice font...

>
> SBCL developers are not eager to support CLISP,

Is that so? One would imagine they would be interested in having SBCL
easier to port to new platforms, where CLisp is already present...

>  and figuring it
> myself isn't my goal.

Fair enough...

> Thus I go with the simplest thing that works.
> I hope, that my work is useful a little bit.

That's exactly what I was going to say - it is. At the end of the day
that portability is not a paramount goal - if one wants to play with
Common Lisp, one can always get some old i386 box, furnish it with
NetBSD and use it... I subscribed to the sbcl developers mailing list
to see if there is any traffic and perhaps ask a thing or two, but so
far it has been quiet.

>
>
> P.S. You may cite this message at your convenience, or even
> create an announce from it, if you find it useful.

It's probably right to have your packages in wip; some comment in the
main lang/sbcl package about them could be useful, though - as a
pointer to a possible first bootstrap procedure.

I'll c/c this to pkgsrc-users.
>


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