Bugzilla Bug 182643

When the X-frontend for maxima, "xmaxima" is launched, it terminates
immediately complaining it cannot find its documentation files.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.xmaxima
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
Error in startup script: can't read "maxima_priv(pReferenceToc)": no such
element in array

Expected Results:  
xmaxima starts up

The problem can easily be solved by adding a symlink:

# ln -s /usr/share/doc/maxima-5.9.1 /usr/share/maxima/5.9.1/doc

(as an example how to fix it for maxima version 5.9.1)

Please add that to the ebuild!

Hi Guenther,

Yes, you are right. This was fixed in later versions though. Please test the
~arch maxima-5.9.11-r2 or even maxima-5.12.0 in the gentooscience overlay 
(using layman). I am planning to get one of these version for stabilization,
though many lisps don't compile fine on my boxes.


Sébastien

Hi Sébastien,

Sorry it took so long for me to respond, but I have a 57 kbps connection right
now and it took bloody ages in order to download all the dependencies.

I have installed the overlay, unmasked and downloaded both maxima-5.11.0-r2 as
well as maxima-5.12.0.

But I encountered a build failure with gcl, so I was unable to build Maxima by
GNU Common LISP which seems to be the default.

However, when I enabled USE=cmucl, Maxima 5.11.0-r2 built just fine.

I did not do extensive tests because I'm still not very proficient in Maxima,
but those things that I tested seemed to work just fine (both maxima and
xmaxima).

Then I updated to Maxima 5.12, and it also seemed to work fine as well.

As a side remark on building, I noticed *loads* of warnings like

; Note: Unable to avoid inline argument range check
; because the argument range (DOUBLE-FLOAT) was not within 2^64

when CMU CL compiled the sources - I dunno whether that matters; just FYI.

And in case you should be interested in the build failure of GNU CL: It failed
while configuration stating

checking for main in -lX11... yes
./configure: line 6962: syntax error near unexpected token `exit'
./configure: line 6962: `echo "${ECHO_T}cannot use bfd" >&6; } exit 1;'

Created an attachment (id=122786) [details]
config.log from the failed gcl build

Here's the log file containing more information about that failed gcl build.

Hi Guenther,

The doc linking problem was fixed in maxima-5.9.1. However, I suggest to update
to maxima-5.13.0, which default lisp is now sbcl. Please report any build
failures of this release to bug #192449.

Sébastien

(In reply to comment #4)

Hi Sébastien,

Thanks a lot for the fix!

> However, I suggest to update
> to maxima-5.13.0

I have done this immediately; it has the additional benefit that 5.13 is back
in the main tree now, while 5.12 has been from the overlay only.

For your reference, I have tested 5.13 both with sbcl as well as cmucl - it
worked well with either LISP.

> which default lisp is now sbcl. Please report any build

Although sbcl works, I reverted to cmucl because I did not like the
bootstrapping approach used by the sbcl ebuild: No matter whether a working CL
installation was available or not, the ebuild always used the binary version
only of sbcl for compiling itself.

I strongly dislike any pre-built binary compiling my sources (except for
initial bootstrapping), so I've re-enabled the cmucl USE flag after testing
5.13 with sbcl.

> failures of this release to bug #192449.

Nothing to report - bug can be closed! :-)