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

On 6/12/26 2:54 PM, Robert Dodier wrote:

> 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.
A long time ago, gcl could read gz-compressed info files. I don’t know 
if the code is in the history or not. I also don’t remember why that 
ability was removed. Maybe no other lisp supported it then?

There is a relatively small gzip library out there. I forgot the name. 
I’d prefer it to be included with Maxima since the help is fundamental 
part of maxima, so not having an external dependency just to read info 
files would be really good. It would kinda suck if you can’t read the 
docs because something external is broken.

​

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