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Re: [Texmacs-dev] Mathematica Plugin


From: Joris van der Hoeven
Subject: Re: [Texmacs-dev] Mathematica Plugin
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:08:47 +0200
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14)

Dear Philippe,

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 09:32:05AM +0000, Philippe Joyez wrote:
> Sorry to disappoint you but I'm afraid that getting a working mathematica 
> plugin
> "out of the box" for new users is not going to happen before the summer. 
> However
> a user with some motivation and knowledge can make it to work. Let me explain
>  why.
> 
> What's broken is not Andrey's mathematica plugin code itself, it's the 
> one-time
> script that runs the first time the user wants to connect to mathematica. That
> script *compiles* the plugin code, linking it to the actual mathlink library 
> on
> the user's system and puts the resulting executable in the user's Texmacs
> directory. Since the time when Andrey wrote the script, there has been 3 major
> releases of Mathematica and the added support of MacOS and Windows in Texmacs,
> that all broke that installation script in various ways.
> 
> Now, fixing the script so that texmacs would in all cases transparently 
> connect
> to mathematica without any user intervention seems unlikely to happen for the
> simple reason that a compiler may not even be available on the user's machine.
> So manual installation of the (OS-dependent) toolchain would be necessary
> anyway. Furthermore the new script(s) would have to handle many OSes and many
> possible mathematica versions, which means someone should have access to all
> (OS-mathematica version) configurations... but who would that be?
> 
> Presently I see no solution other than providing good how-tos on the
> compilation, or at best platform-specific scripts. What I posted last year in
> the users' list (http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.editors.texmacs.user/7409) is
> how to perform this one-time compilation in linux, which isn't really a big
> deal. In Albufeira, Miguel worked out the way to do this on MacOS for 
> Bertrand.
> If I understood correctly, it was not as easy as in linux and that should
> probably be written into a howto as well. Then it would certainly be nice to
> centralize these instructions at some place (the famous wiki? a forum with a
> dedicated "plugins" section?) so that they could be maintained up-to date with
> user contributions for new setups, new versions, etc. 

What I propose is that those who are willing to work on the howto's
also try to fix the installation script at least in those cases when
they can make it work.

I agree that this is not nice to program, since it might involve tests
on both the OS and the version of Mathematica. However, I think that
this is really how a novel user would expect things to behave.

The real pain here is that Mathematica and Maple provide so called
'Open' interfaces which we are not allowed to link in to our software.
So there is not much else that we can do than compile things on the fly.

Best wishes, --Joris




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