folder naming conventions and installed version identifier, was: Maxima searching all "binary" directories: conflicts & performance degradation

David, thanks for working on this stuff. I agree it's a good idea to
solve it somehow.

About searching only the binary folder for the current version -- agreed.

About creating another top-level folder -- I'm against it, I think the
binary folder should go inside the top-level per-user maxima folder
(same as it is now).

About baking the OS name into the binary path -- I'm against it, I
don't think it's common enough to justify the effort, which is mostly
going to be trying to fix bugs after the fact when users report it's
not working for them.

It's a mess to have multiple folders for different combinations of
Maxima + Lisp versions, but I don't think Maxima should try to clean
that up; I think we should leave it for the users to deal with. I
expect the vast majority of users are going to have one Maxima + Lisp
combination for each installed version -- I think that's tolerable.

You didn't mention it, but I've come to the conclusion that installed
versions of Maxima should only identify themselves via
version-specific identifiers, as it is now with uninstalled versions
(e.g. branch_5_49_base_392_g85c1954 as it is right now); identifying
itself as "5.nnnpost", e.g. 5.49post, makes it impossible to
distinguish different installed versions. That is a serious
consequence for bug reporting, and also for the file search problem. I
guess we would have to modify configure.ac or something to fix that.

All the best,

Robert