[Axiom-developer] axiom-20050201 Debian packages going out today

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!  For those interested, I've split the package a bit
further, adding axiom-graphics, axiom-hypertex, axiom-graphics-data,
axiom-hypertex-data to the structure present in 20040831.  This is
primarily to forestall the inevitable complaints from those who want
to use axiom without installing X.  

Running everything under sman also broke the former readline terminal
command-line interface present in the Debian package.  readline has
certain advantages over clef, so I've taken the liberty of modifying
the shell wrapper to invoke AXIOMsys directly when -nogr and -noht
are set, or -nox, or there is no DISPLAY environment variable set.
This currently lumps session and spadclient with viewman and hypertex
as programs that one would like to use when having X -- I'm pretty
sure this is not true, but I will need some more time to understand
what session and spadclient do.  The overwhelming majority of users
will doubtlessly run transparently under sman. 

I'm wondering whether we would gain anything from being able to run
these processes from lisp rather than the other way round?  No sense
reinventing the wheel if no advantage is in sight, but if there is
reason, it would give me an excuse to overhaul the GCL socket code,
which is straightforward, but apparently unused by anyone at present. 

In going over the old Debian bugs, I noticed that
)edit/SPADEDIT/source-pamplet-filename reporting is still broken.
This got me thinking that a nice emacs interface would really be
useful -- i.e. a debugger mode allowing breakpoint setting, and source
display in another window, at the lisp and spad levels.  Dr. Schelter
had put together dbl for maxima/gcl.  This appears to have promise. 

bessintr.eps is empty.  The AXIOM variable setting in the axiom script
needs to be exported if one is using bash.

Overall, things are looking quite nice.  I wish we could plot to
gnuplot as an option.  On a far lower scale, would be nice to use a
more advanced toolkit for the hypertext, like gcl-gtk or some such.  

Take care,

-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah