[LON-CAPA-admin] Maxima versions (5.11.0, 5.12.0)

[Guy Albertelli II]

Hi Stefan,

> What maxima version can I expect to be installed by LON-CAPA?

Either 5.11.0 or 5.12.0 depending on the distribution being run on the
machine (Currently Redhat Entriprise 4 machines should be running
5.12.0 all other supported distributions should be running 5.11.0. And
unsupported Fedora 4 appears to be running 5.9.3)

Depending on the distribution the underlying lisp engine might be
either  gcl, clisp, or sbcl

> Have you changed the maxima version (which comes with LON-CAPA)
> during the rollouts of LON-CAPA 2.4.0, 2.4.1 and 2.4.2?

The update of system software is usually done separate from LON-CAPA
software updates.

I don't have records of exactly when what version of maxima has been
installed for the various different distributions and their
versions. We did have some issues getting maxima 5.11.0 working on
RHEL4, which is why it's currently on 5.12.0.

We try to use whatever version is shipping with that distribution if
possible to cut down on the amount of package building we have to do
to keep a distribution supported and working.


> I'm still confused about the fact that on our old server maxima 5.11.0
> has been installed by LON-CAPA by the update process and, in contrast,
> LON-CAPA update on the new server installed maxima 5.12.0. Even more
> confusing is that another LON-CAPA update (2.4.2) on the old machine
> doesn't update maxima to 5.12.0, 5.11.0 remained.
> 
> Is there something wrong?

Nope.

the UPDATE script only modifies files that were made by LON-CAPA, all
software LON-CAPA depends on are kept updated through the standard RPM
updating machanism of the distribution that you are using.

I don't believe we are currently planning to update the maxima version
on all supported distributions any time soon. Newer versions of
distributions will likely ship with newer versions of maxima if the
distribution has a prebuilt one we can use.

Is there a reason we should move all distributions forward to 5.12.0?

-- 
guy at albertelli.com   0-7-0-9-27,137