Re: Maxima searching all "binary" directories: conflicts & performance degradation

On 4/18/26 1:33 AM, David Scherfgen via Maxima-discuss wrote:

>
>       Proposed fixes
>
>
>       To fix this, I propose two adjustments:
>
>  *
>
>     *Restrict the search path:
>     *Exclude any subdirectory of the |binary| directory /except/ for
>     the specific path that matches the user's current Maxima and Lisp
>     version.
>
>         *Note: *Unfortunately, this alone won't fully prevent
>         performance degradation, since all the binary subdirectories
>         would still be enumerated by the directory function (which can
>         be slow), but at least we could avoid actually checking them
>         for the searched file.
>
>         *Alternative: *Put the binary (and other "internal") files
>         into a different folder inside the user's home directory, e.g.
>         maxima-internal, and only search inside the subdirectory that
>         matches the user's current Maxima and Lisp version. This would
>         completely fix the issue, but I don't know how people feel
>         about adding another "top-level" directory.
>
An oversight, I guess, on my part because I almost never install maxima. 
The search path should definitely be restricted to the version that 
matches. I think it is problematic to use the current .maxima directory 
to have a binary subdirectory. You definitely want to search the users 
.maxima and all subdirectories for files. I have several subdirectories 
there including some github repos of Maxima code that I use.

It might be easiest to have a new directory ~/.maxima-binary to contain 
the fasls? And still have a search path of ~/.maxima/**/*.lisp?

>  *
>
>     *Add an OS distinction layer (optional but recommended):
>     *With virtualization, emulation and shared network drives being
>     common, we should consider adding the OS to the path structure.
>     For example: |binary/5_47post/sbcl/2_6_3/windows| and
>     |binary/5_47post/sbcl/2_6_3/linux|. This would prevent
>     cross-platform interference.
>
> I’d love to hear your thoughts on this approach before I start putting 
> together a patch.
>
I’m not opposed and it seems pretty easy to do, but I wonder if Maxima 
user’s actually do this? My feeling is that most users (not developers) 
only have Windows, so these aren’t a problem.

I don’t share my home directory between machines. Too lazy to set it up, 
plus it gives me some redundancy in case one machine dies. I have a 
small NAS, but I don’t share directories. That’s turns out to be good 
since one of the drives has finally died after many years. And even HDDs 
are really expensive now.

​

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