Re: *.lisp in /usr/info, redux

Judah, thanks a lot for dealing with the Slackware package.

About the .lisp files among the .info. Those are the index files for
the info and HTML documentation. At the end of the file, there is a
line of code to call a function to build lookup tables from the items
in the index.

One of the arguments is a pathname for the directory from which to
read the files. At present that's supplied as
(maxima:maxima-load-pathname-directory), which returns the pathname of
the directory containing the index (and therefore the .info files at
present). If (maxima:maxima-load-pathname-directory) is replaced with
something else, then the files will be loaded from that place.

I don't know what's easier here. I guess the Slackware package could
have a patch which replaces the load pathname. Or we could change the
code in Maxima (doc/info/build_index.pl) which emits the index .lisp
file. Probably the latter is preferable, although I don't have a
strong preference at the moment. I think this stuff came up on
maxima-discuss not too long ago, although I forget how it played out.

About reading compressed info, I would be interested to make that
happen, if only because being able to read a compressed stream is
generally useful. The simplest way to make that happen is to import a
library via Quicklisp or whatever, it doesn't matter how it is loaded
so long as it accommodates enough Lisp implementations. The second
easiest is to copy a library into Maxima and compile it along with
everything else. If the library is small and simple enough, that would
be OK too.

If we go down the road of reading compressed files, I am leaning
towards a Quicklisp (or work-alike) solution. It only needs to work
for developers as it would be baked into an image to be distributed.
The major sticking point with Quicklisp is that it doesn't work with
GCL at present. Although there have been rumblings to the effect that
that might happen, I'm not holding my breath. Frankly I think we
should get something working whether GCL supports it or not.

FWIW

Robert