ANNOUNCE: Maxima 5.9.0
James Amundson
see <http://maxima.sourceforge.net> for more details, including source and
binary downloads.
--James Amundson
Maxima Project Leader
Release notes for Maxima 5.9.0:
This is the first of a series of development releases which will
culminate in Maxima 6.0, the first truly stable release of the new
Maxima project. This release has known bugs; see "Known issues..."
below. However, we believe it is stable enough for use by a wide
audience. We are relying on bug reports from users to help us make 6.0
the most bug-free version of Maxima ever.
Changes in this release include:
1) Maxima is now compatible with ANSI Common Lisp. CMUCL, Clisp
and GCL are fully supported.
2) Maxima has a new build system based on the GNU
Autotools. Installation should be easier and more flexible than
ever before.
3) The Maxima build now uses mk:defsystem from CLOCC at the Lisp
level. mk:defsystem provides a powerful and familiar environment
for Lisp developers.
4) Maxima has a new User Manual, which is provided as a complement
to the detailed reference manual from earlier versions of Maxima.
5) The command-line interface has been enhanced with several
options, including a batch mode.
6) The bundled Emacs/XEmacs modes have been improved.
7) The internal layout of source code and shared Maxima files has
been vastly improved.
8) Precision of some numerical special functions has been
dramatically enhanced.
9) New and improved binary packages for Windows and Linux are now
part of the official distribution.
10) Last, but not least, many bugs have been fixed.
Known issues in this release include:
1) One of the (many) tests in the Maxima test suite fails. When
the test suite is run via "make check" this known failure (Problem
4 in rtest15.mac) will be listed as an expected error in the
summary.
2) The test suite is available in xmaxima. Xmaxima should also
flag the known failure described above as expected, but it does
not. This behavior will be improved in a later version of
(X)Maxima.
3) When compiled with GCL, Maxima will fail to compile functions
when the current working directory is not writable. This will
typically cause the test suite to fail when run from xmaxima under
Unix-like systems because it sets the current working directory to
the installed tests directory. The end result will look like this:
------------------------------------------------------------------
/* ********************** Problem 43. *************** */
%Input is
DESOLVE([EQN1, EQN2], [f(x), G(x)])
x + 2 contains more than one independent variable.
-- an error. Quitting. To debug this try DEBUGMODE(TRUE);)
------------------------------------------------------------------
4) The maxima command-line executable is only fully functional
under Unix-like systems, which includes Win32+MSYS, but not plain
Win32. Under Win32, the executable maxima.bat is available but it
has limited functionality. (The Win32 distribution does contain
xmaxima, however, which is fully functional under Win32.) This
problem will be fixed in a later version of Maxima.
5) maxima.bat does not properly set the Maxima directory. This
will cause several problems including the inability to access
on-line help and plotting. As a workaround, set the environment
variable MAXIMA_PREFIX to the installed location of Maxima, which
is usually "C:/Program Files/Maxima-5.9.0". This problem will be
fixed in a later version of Maxima.
6) The share and demo files have many problems. These problems
will be addressed in a later release.
7) There are still many open bugs in the Maxima bug tracking
database. See
<http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=104933&group_id=4933&func=browse>
for details.