Re: [Texmacs-dev] New REDUCE plugin (second try)

[Andrey G. Grozin]

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> Andreas: can you please take into account Andrey's remarks and
> send me a tarball with the new plug-in. Then I will include it
> for the next version.
My script is not required for working with the reduce plugin; any 
modification of the current reduce script which checks if we are running 
under TeXmacs and disables redfront would be enough. I simply propose an
alternative to the standard reduce script, which is ... hmm ... too 
minimalistic and inflexible.

> Please make it as simple as possible for user to install the plug-in.
> Ideally speaking, plug-ins are assumed to run out of the box (which is
> actually the case for all plug-ins except reduce), so you are assumed
> to hack something together to get that done. If the compilation of
> some additional package is needed, then you might modify the tm_reduce
> script so that this package is compiled when needed. This is what
> we recently did in the cases of Maple and Mathematica.
This is not easy if reduce is installed by root. First, one has to correct 
errors made by the reduce-3.8 installer (one way is explained at the 
Andreas' web page; I did it long ago and slightly differently). While we 
are at it, it would be good to correct permissions of files in the reduce 
tree: they seem random and prevent normal operation: users cannot read 
help files, some text files have the executable bit set, etc. This is a 
mess; I'm sure any reasonable sysadmin has made many necessary changes in 
his reduce installation, and rewriting the startup script is a minor 
detail compared to the rest of it. While doing all this work, it would be 
easy to add the line about tmprint.red to package.red, and build tmprint.b 
by mkpckge.

It would be good to write prominantly in README (or INSTALL or whatever) 
that
1. only reduce-3.8 is supported;
2. if the user used the old reduce interface, it will suddenly stop 
working; and what to do to make it work again

Just some thoughts.

Andrey