[Texmacs-dev] Fwd: Re: Mathematica Plugin

[B.Bratschi]

You can find in this folder all the stuff used for, and generated during the compilation.

best wishes
bertrand

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Le 25.04.12 13:08, Joris van der Hoeven a écrit :

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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