TODO.txt

Improvements / TODOs for the crosscompiling script
==================================================

And some reasons why I did make some decisions...

1. The default installation directory (C:\Maxima-VERSION)
---------------------------------------------------------

The default installation directory is C:\maxima-VERSION.
Users are dicouraged to change the path, because that may cause problems:

- The default installation root ("C:\Program files") contains a space, which
  might cause issues, because one needs to escape it.

- The default installation path for a 32 Bit program is different on 32 and 
  64 Bit Windows Systems.

- When one builds Maxima using Autoconf, in './configure', the installation 
  prefix (--prefix=...) is set to a fixed value - and that value is used when 
  compiling maxima (at least in the manpage (not really relevant on Windows) 
  but also for some Lisp-variables (e.g. *autoconf-prefix*, ...).

- A user might choose a installation directory with problematic characters
  (e.g. UTF8 chars in another language, special characters), which might
  cause problems.



2. Using other LISPs
--------------------

At first the crosscompiling procedure worked only with CLISP.
CLISP was selected, because it worked nice with "Wine" (which is needed for
crosscompiling) and they just released a ZIP file, which one can easy extract.

Now SBCL is also included (the MSI-Installer can be extracted using 7z and
a small shell script).

Using other LISPs might be a good idea (I tried it), but there are some issues:

GCL released exe installers (currently only for older versions), crosscompiling
did not work for me.

Crosscompiling ECL works and it seems to work with 'wine', but only in bytecode-mode -
and Maxima can currently not compiled, if ECL uses the bytecode compiler.

CCL released a ZIP File for windows (which is promising), but sadly it does
not work with wine.



Wolfgang Dautermann