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

Removing all previous systems might help.
Somewhat tangential..
I was finding disk storage getting filled up for no apparent reason,
and then discovered another CAS squatting on large directories for each
version.
Mathematica's local documentation, which does not vary that much from say
14.0 to 14.1 took 9 Gigabytes.
The total install is apparently about 21 GB now,  so keeping backup old
copies as a silent default has
definite downsides.
RJF



On Sat, Apr 18, 2026 at 11:10 AM Raymond Toy <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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.
> &#8203;
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