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Re: Backport of wxMaxima fom testing to Jessie



On Di, Sep 22, 2015 at 10:01 , Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 09:08:57PM +0200, Gunter Königsmann wrote:
I did just get a request (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=796954) to backport the new wxMaxima version to Jessie.
Actually, I made the backport request *privately*.
Arrgh!
Did interpret this wrong.
What I asked in Bug #796954 was to have a fix for such bug in jessie, which clearly a backport can't be.
This is a bit of a problem:
Nearly everything in wxMaxima is organized in Lisp and traditionally every time lists were traversed this would be done by recursive function calls - which is consistent with maxima which has been written in Lisp: Lisp compilers automatically unroll tail recursions into loops.
Since C compilers don't do this wxMaxima was prone to crash 
 - on outputting large expressions
 - on outputting long lists of expressions
 - on saving while maxima was still working in the background
 - and sometimes on unexpected events.
Also reverse-engineering the inner workings of wxMaxima and documenting them uncovered a few bugs as every new pair that joins a project always will.
=> When I tried to change things so they would fit better to my use cases I always kept an eye on changing recursions into loops and on hindering fringe cases from doing something unexpected. But there is no large patch that will correct the bugs that could provoke crashes under certain circumstances, just a program that was gradually optimized on stability when rewriting a bit while implementing new features.
As jessie and jessie-backports are completely different things, I humbly ask both of you, Gunter and Vincent, not to mix both things in the same thread.
It was my fault, not of Vincent who was always willing to help me and who is the person that caused the wxMaxima package in debian testing to be consistent with a big number of standards.

---

Since I work on a Ubuntu, not a Debian box I am no expert on the inner workings of Debian. But I had loads of crashes with 13.04. If there is a way to get the new wxMaxima version into other than only the "testing" repo and I need to do something in order to trigger this I am happy to do it. Just tell me what I have to do.

Kind regards,

      Gunter.
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