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