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Re: [Fink-users] TeXmacs and Maxima


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  • From: Martin Costabel <address@hidden>
  • To: address@hidden
  • Subject: Re: [Fink-users] TeXmacs and Maxima
  • Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 08:57:42 +0200
Martin Costabel wrote:

This actually poses a bigger problem: The locate database has a tendency to not be up to date, because in the best case it is updated once a day, and on laptops typically it is never updated at all unless locate.updatedb is started manually. Now since texmacs uses locate to find all kinds of files, pixmaps, TeX font maps, and apparently also documentation, it is inevitable that it will make mistakes.

After looking into this some more (I wish I hadn't!), it seems to me that the use of 'locate' is restricted to some truly evil hacks by which texmacs tries to find paths to the TeX and maxima installation.

I hope a more standard way to do this can be found. Or maybe for fink's texmacs I should patch init_texmacs.cc and init_first.cc to get rid of this stuff.

In the case of maxima, I see in the texmacs sources, in init_texmacs.cc, the following code

string where= concretize (resolve_in_path ("maxima"));
string s = var_eval_system ("grep 'MAXIMA_DIRECTORY=' " * where);

But the only occurrence of MAXIMA_DIRECTORY in the maxima script is in the following interesting paragraph (I am not making this up!). From /sw/bin/maxima:

# For some reason TeXmacs sets MAXIMA_DIRECTORY to the empty string,
# which breaks maxima's internal path logic. This is a workaround.
if [ -z "$MAXIMA_DIRECTORY" ]; then
unset MAXIMA_DIRECTORY
fi

This looks like a case of deep mutual misunderstanding.

--
Martin






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