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

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 08:16:48PM +0700, Andrey G. Grozin wrote:
> >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.

Thanks for your thoughts, Andrey ;^)

I was although thinking about the following possibility:
when trying to start reduce while the necessary extra package
has not been compiled, automatically display a help page
with instructions on how to build the package.

Anyway, I will now wait for a possibly updated plug-in
from Andreas and include it in the next distribution.
The laptop on which I had an old (too old?) version of
reduce installed is broken, so I will not test it anyway.

Best wishes, Joris