[gentoo-science] maxima-5.14.0 and related stuff

["Andrey G. Grozin" <A.G.Grozin@inp.nsk.su>]

Hello *,

As you may have noticed, I committed maxima-5.14.0 to the science overlay. 
The 5.13.0 ebuild in the main tree is not good, from my point of view, 
because it does not allow one to build maxima with several lisps, and I 
definitely want this (to compare running times and, sometimes, behaviour 
too). The new ebuild is much cleaner and more systematic in the sense that 
it is trivial to add (or remove) any lisp to the set of supported lisps.

Speaking of lisps, the current Gentoo gcl is broken (this fact is not 
related to maxima). I am currently in contact with the authors, and hope 
the authors, and hope to understand what goes wrong when it is built in 
Gentoo - in Debian, for example, it works fine.

As usual, a new version of maxima requires a patch in TeXmacs. It was much 
simpler than I thought - large changes in strings implementation in maxima 
were taken into account already in TeX generation functions, and from the 
TeXmacs point of view nothing changed. I committed texmacs-1.0.6.12-r1 to 
the science overlay, it works with maxima-5.14.0.

Recently a user reported a problem with the TeXmacs-maxima interface (he 
was not on Gentoo, but the problem is platform-neutral). I have a fix 
already; will commit it to the overlay (and send to Joris) soon.

maxima-5.14.0 does not work properly with the previous version of 
wxmaxima. I committed wxmaxima-0.7.4 which is for the new maxima. The 
author of wxmaxima says that there is a bug in wxwidgets-2.8.6 which 
upsets wxmaxima; therefore, I depend on >=wxmaxima-2.8.7 (haven't checked 
that the bug mentioned is really absent in this case, though).

Also the previous version of imaxima cannot be used with 5.14.0. 
imaxima-0.99 was created for this. It depends on >=breqn-0.97a (the 
current breqn in the tree is 0.94).

The situation with breqn has changed recently: its license has been at 
last clarified (it's LaTeX public license), and it got a new maintainer, 
Morten Hoegholm (as you probably know, Michael Downes died a few years 
ago). It is now part of a set of math tools for LaTeX maintained by 
Morten, http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/mh/
I've written an ebuild for this mathtools LaTeX package. I depend on 
!dev-tex/breqn; however, I heard that breqn is also in texlive, and this 
conflict should be resolved, but I don't use texlive yet. There are a few 
problems:

1. Files constituing the package have no version numbers in their names, 
and change rather often. If I use individual files from ctan, the ebuild 
will break quickly. The proper hing to do is to make a snapshot (with a 
version number given by the date, like 20080112) and mirror it somewhere. 
But I cannot do this with the science overlay.

2. Naturally, I inherited latex-package eclass. But it does not process 
*.dtx files, only *.ins ones. I had to re-define src_compile; the proper 
thing to do is to add *.dtx processing to latex-package.eclass.

So, this ebuild is not yet committed, it is in my local tree. And so is 
imaxima-0.99.ebuild. It builds, but I somehow cannot make imaxima work; I 
never used it before, and probably I'm doing something stupid.

Best wishes,
Andrey
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