Feature SS-3562
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[Maxima] easier access to maxima package
Created by Davide on 9/5/2018 7:20 PM Last Updated by Martin Kraska on 9/14/2018 1:09 PM
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 Description

Provide easier access to the maxima package in the settings dialog

  1. Folder selector (as it is)
  2. Automated download & install from our SVN repository of a portable maxima tested to be compatible with the plugin (e.g. from plugins/MaximaPlugin/MaximaPortable/Maxima-{VERSION}.zip)
  3. Link to the maxima website

 
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    Martin Kraska (Friday, September 14, 2018 1:09 PM) #

Instruction for Ubuntu installation: https://de.wikihow.com/Unter-Windows-7-Virtualbox-mit-Ubuntu-Linux-installieren

    Martin Kraska (Thursday, September 6, 2018 12:36 PM) #

Cool.

Currently the SVN Maximaplugin is up to date. I spent the last days working on the interactive handbook. Next week I might touch the plugin again, I'll try to commit frequently to reduce conflicts.

 

For point 2, I have to see if the old maxima.bat tweaks for portability still work. Haven't done batch file programming for years.

If I recall correctly, my last attempts to make a portable Maxima worked from SMath side but the gui stuff like wxmaxima was broken. Of course, we can decide not to care about this. 

 

Old handbook notes for portable maxima (Note that the maxima.bat file has a different structure now)

Maxima selbst stellt keine portablen Versionen bereit. Es gibt Windows Installer, die aktuelle SMath Distribution benutzt Maxima 5.34.1.

Mit einigen Modifikationen in der Datei maxima.bat kann man aber eine portable Version bekommen. Diese Beschreibung geht davon aus, dass die Installation in das Installationsverzeichnis von SMath erfolgt, der Installationsort also z.B. D:\SMath\SMath 0.98.6179 heißt.

    Davide (Thursday, September 6, 2018 12:18 PM) #

Yes I can do it by myself.

Since maxima is quite heavy and in theory more stable than the plugin my idea is to keep them separated, thus a plugin update doesn't requires hundred of Megabytes every time.

To simplify furthermore the installation I'll test a check on the plugin initialization, so if maxima path is not found the user will be prompted to do one of the actions listed above even without looking in the main menu.

    Martin Kraska (Wednesday, September 5, 2018 8:45 PM) #

I agree that access should be easier.

Davide, do I get it right, that you are willing to provide an improved settings dialog (you assigned the issue to yourself!). This would be more than welcome.

In the long run, the ideal would be to have a script, which generates a custom Maxima binary based on the Maxima repositories. This should be much less then 100 MB and perhaps could be delivered directly with the plug-in. Making this requires a thorough understanding of Maxima's build skripts in order to get rid of all unnecessary stuff and to correctly set the environment. Until we have that, I will entirely rely on the standard (non-portable) installation of Maxima in order to minimizer maintenance effort.

Worth mentioning: It should be possible to tune the plugin to run under Linux.

Just as a note for later work: What could be dropped from standard maxima:

  • Restrict to SBCL compiler (the distribution has multiple other lisp compilers but SBCL is the only one which can handle unicode)
  • Leave out any docs
  • Eventually leave out all external packages (just load the required ones and dump a binary)
  • Leave out the GUI stuff (like wxmaxima) and VTK

When uni makes further progress with XY-Plot and adds a decent XYZ-Plot, I might even drop the graphics stuff from the plugin.