[Ecls-list] compiling Maxima by ECL

[Robert Dodier]

Hello,

I have gotten Maxima (current CVS head + ECL-specific changes)
compiled by ECL (current CVS head, release 0.9j won't work).
I committed the ECL-specific stuff on the branch patches-for-ecl-branch
in Maxima CVS. I merged in a patch posted by Michael Goffioul in 2005
and some stuff I did a few months ago.
Many thanks to Michael G for his contribution.

I couldn't get the autoconf/automake stuff to work, but I was able
to get Maxima compiled by following the instructions in
maxima/INSTALL.lisp.

The resulting maxima.fas sort of works but the testsuite
shows a lot of errors. I haven't looked into it in detail, but
it appears that the assume stuff (inferences about sign of
expressions) isn't working, and my first guess about that
is that all the EVAL-WHEN stuff is dorked up.

Incidentally run_testsuite() itself barfs out an error,
that the name of a file that needs to be loaded (namely
testsuite.lisp) is not a stream. I worked around it by
loading testsuite.lisp separately first.

I have a couple of motivations for attempting Maxima + ECL.
(1) ECL is a potential replacement for GCL on Windows.
(2) It appears that the Sage project is interested only in
Maxima + ECL. If Maxima continues to be usable through
Sage, we might get some bug reports and, who knows,
even bug fixes from Sage.

I'll look into this some more & let you know if I can resolve anything.
I would like to take this opportunity to invite interested parties
of any/all projects to try this also, maybe your luck is better.

FWIW & HTH.

Robert Dodier
Maxima developer