[Axiom-developer] this is open source

[root]

there are 22 developers listed with WRITE access to every
project on arch.axiom-developer.org. write access is available
for the asking.

while i don't expect people to mangle the axiom--main branch
virtually every one can create a branch, make changes, test
them, and post patches. there are 13 publicly listed branches
with almost no commits. and arch allows private branch development.

if people are unhappy with some feature, or some feature is
missing, or some code rearrangement is suggested then branch
the code, mangle the branch, polish it so it "just works",
document it, diff it (or point us at a polished branch) and
we can discuss the changes on the list. we can download and
test it. and if it works and people like it, we merge it.

i get the impression that people feel this is a single-threaded
effort thru me but MY impression and the reason so many people
have write access is that this is free software and anyone
is free to change what they like. but i do expect professional-quality
changes with the same level of QA work that is put into the rest
of the system (although it isn't apparent because it all happens
behind the scenes). i have 6 machines on my desk and 2 dozen
separate branches locally so i'm kinda swamped getting the basics
like MACOSX working cleanly. some of these projects will take many
years. so proposing that *I* fix things just adds to the queue.

when people have suggested new platforms like windows or sbcl,
new guis, new algebra, or whatever a new branch is created. i
expect that (a) people will commit to those branches and (b)
people will develop their idea to the level that it "just works"
and (c) people will document their work so it can be understood
and changed by others and (d) people will bring their branch up
to the latest level so other people can test it. this is what
you expect on the main branch.

axiom is free software. design it, hack it, polish it, test it,
document it, and send patches (or arch changesets). you're allowed to
do anything you want and have no reason to depend on me for anything
(except the final merge step into axiom--main). but we ALL expect
quality work.

t

[Bob McElrath]

Post by root
when people have suggested new platforms like windows or sbcl,
new guis, new algebra, or whatever a new branch is created. i
expect that (a) people will commit to those branches and (b)
people will develop their idea to the level that it "just works"
and (c) people will document their work so it can be understood
and changed by others and (d) people will bring their branch up
to the latest level so other people can test it. this is what
you expect on the main branch.

Remember that effort is an exponentially falling distribution. Just a
guess, but each line below will at least halve the number of people that
make it to that step. Open source occurs on the tail.

# website viewers
# downloaders
# that get axiom running
# that try to compute something "real"
# that try to modify something
# that attempt to submit patches/create arch branch
# that develop patch to usability
# that document their patch
# that take the effort to get the patch integrated.

--
Cheers,
Bob McElrath [Univ. of California at Davis, Department of Physics]

"In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it
would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that
apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit
equal time in physics classrooms." -- Stephen Jay Gould (1941 - 2002)

[C Y]

Post by root
axiom is free software. design it, hack it, polish it, test it,
document it, and send patches (or arch changesets). you're
allowed to do anything you want and have no reason to depend
on me for anything (except the final merge step into axiom--
main). but we ALL expect quality work.

Sorry if we're not pulling our weight Tim - I know I haven't been.
I've got a variety of things on my system I want to take a shot at, but
I have so much to learn :-/.

Maybe the thing to do in my case is worrying less about the details
like McCLIM backends and just start doing something more relevant (like
a math GUI in McCLIM). Presumably the backend can follow later. Lord
knows I've got enough stuff queued up to keep me busy for a while!

Thanks again for all your hard work, and I'll try to talk less until I
have something substantial to exhibit :-).

Cheers,
Cliff

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[root]

Loading Image...

sbcl on windows popping up a native windows messagebox

t

[Jay Belanger]

Post by C Y

Post by root
axiom is free software. design it, hack it, polish it, test it,
document it, and send patches (or arch changesets). you're
allowed to do anything you want and have no reason to depend
on me for anything (except the final merge step into axiom--
main). but we ALL expect quality work.

Sorry if we're not pulling our weight Tim

Was the original post a comment about people not pulling their weight?
I didn't think so, but regardless, I need to do something.
I can now start on EAxiom for Cliff.
Also, I seem to recall seeing a package to do Lie symmetry analysis of
PDEs in Axiom, but I can't come across it again. (Googling "Axiom"
and anything mathematical doesn't always give results about the CAS.)
What, if anything, is out there?

Jay

[C Y]

WOW. I did not know things had progressed that far. Exciting times.

Cheers,
CY

Post by root
http://www.dridus.com/~nyef/messagebox-goodness.png
sbcl on windows popping up a native windows messagebox
t

__________________________________________________
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[Page, Bill]

Post by C Y
WOW. I did not know things had progressed that far.
Exciting times.

Post by root
http://www.dridus.com/~nyef/messagebox-goodness.png
sbcl on windows popping up a native windows messagebox

Lisp pop-ups on Windows is exciting?

... oh, I am sooo depressed ...

;)

Bill Page.

[Page, Bill]

Post by Bob McElrath
...
Remember that effort is an exponentially falling distribution.
Just a guess, but each line below will at least halve the number
of people that make it to that step. Open source occurs on the
tail.

I disagree. Or at least, I don't think that this has to be the case.
That is the reason why we have a wiki containing all the help and
documentation directly available for search and update via the web.
That is why we have the entire Axiom source distribution available
directly for updating over the web. That is why we can write and
execute Axiom programs over the web.

Post by Bob McElrath
# website viewers

I want contributors to the Axiom wiki to start here!

Post by Bob McElrath
# downloaders

I want potential contributors to the Axiom source code to
start about here!

Post by Bob McElrath
# that get axiom running
# that try to compute something "real"
# that try to modify something
# that attempt to submit patches/create arch branch
# that develop patch to usability
# that document their patch
# that take the effort to get the patch integrated.

The rest of this reverse osmosis filter is about long term
quality assurance. That takes time but it does not mean that
developers should hesitate to do make small or large changes
without all this "red tape". What eventually makes it into the
"official" Axiom source distribution is another issue, but that
should not stop anyone from experimenting, learning and
contributing in a much less structured manner.

They can do that privately in their own source code environments
or they can do it more publicly via the Axiom Wiki. All types
of Axiom-related programming are now possible through the web
including Lisp, Boot, Spad, Aldor and Axiom interpreter scripts.
And we also have a very flexible environment for writing
documentation. All of this code and documentation is directly
portable to the actual Axiom source distribution when/if we are
satisfied with the quality of the result.

Regards,
Bill Page.

[Ralf Hemmecke]

Post by Page, Bill
They can do that privately in their own source code environments
or they can do it more publicly via the Axiom Wiki. All types
of Axiom-related programming are now possible through the web
including Lisp, Boot, Spad, Aldor and Axiom interpreter scripts.

For a beginner these are too many languages to choose from. People
need guidance when to use which, and which language will be supported
on the long run. (Nobody wants to invest time in a language that will
soon be discontinued.)

Great that you drop in. You are exactly right.

People need guidance.

That is what I am still missing in the Axiom project. I will take the
burden and try to put some HowTo sections into the developer's guide
under book--main--1. I still have no clear idea how I can do this but
I'll try to write down my steps so that it is perhaps a bit easier for
others to contribute to Axiom and to find their way through the Axiom
jungle. I would be happy if you could contribute. What exactly are you
missing? Would you like to do something for Axiom and don't know where
to start or what are your questions?

I somehow have the impression that the FAQ section is a bit unwritten
and does not really invite people to put in their questions that will
perhaps be answered by somebody who can. Bill, what do you think about
making it more explicit on the FAQ wiki that people should put their
questions there? The axiom-developer list is great, but questions and
answers get burried easily.

Matthias and anyone else who is listening, tell your critisism. We all
can learn from it and probably (try to) improve.

Ralf

[m***@univ-orleans.fr]

Hello Bill,

Post by Bill Page
web site. What we need most I think is for someone to explicitly
take on the task of helping to maintain and develop the FAQ.
It is easy for anyone who has a browser to do this from anywhere
in the world.

Yes, I believe you, but it is not so easy for non English-speaking people =
to modify texts in
English, as one (well, at least me :-) is always frightened to introduce b=
ad syntax,
incorrect words so that "improving" might appear "corrupting" to English-s=
peaking
readers (even if the scientific contents is improved). BTW, is it possible=
easily with Plone
to have bi(multi-)lingual pages, for example so that one could switch from=
English to
French by clicking on a flag or button in the current page ? This could so=
lve partly the
problem, maybe?

Best wishes,
***@univ-orleans.fr
http://www.univ-orleans.fr/EXT/ASTEX
ftp://ftp.univ-orleans.fr/pub/tex/PC/AsTeX
liste de discussion: ***@univ-orleans.fr
Abonnement =E0 la liste: envoyer un message de contenu
"sub astex Nom Prenom Etablissement" =E0 ***@univ-orleans.fr

[m***@univ-orleans.fr]

Post by Bill Page
My opinion is that it is highest priority to improve the
scientific contents even if the quality of the English is not
perfect. You will notice that even though English is my first
language, I still manage occasionally to introduce bad syntax
and incorrect words. :) Please do not let that stop you from
making improvements to the content. If there is some concern
then someone else can make improvements to your English.

OK, thanks a lot for the encouragements, I tried my bad English :-)

Post by Bill Page

BTW, is it possible easily with Plone to have bi(multi-)lingual
pages, for example so that one could switch from English to French
by clicking on a flag or button in the current page ?

Yes. The axiom-developer.org sever has two different websites
that support Axiom: one is called the Axiom Wiki and it is based
only on Zope and ZWiki (with extensions for LaTeX and Axiom).
The Axiom Wiki has only limited support for translations of some
of the fixed text such as menus and headings.

I created SandBoxLaTeX and tried to put some accented letters in it,

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/SandBoxLaTeX#bottom

could you tell me if they are correctly displayed on English configuration=
?

Post by Bill Page
The other website is called the Axiom Portal and it is based on
Plone and Zwiki (with the same extensions).
http://portal.axiom-developer.org
Right now the I18N product for Plone have not yet been installed. But
if you or anyone else would like to experiment with multi- lingual
documents on the Axiom Portal, I would be glad to install the I18N
package. I would also be happy to try to contribute to such documents.

Great. Yes, I would be very happy to experiment it, if you were so kind to=
install it

Best wishes,

***@univ-orleans.fr
http://www.univ-orleans.fr/EXT/ASTEX
ftp://ftp.univ-orleans.fr/pub/tex/PC/AsTeX
liste de discussion: ***@univ-orleans.fr
Abonnement =E0 la liste: envoyer un message de contenu
"sub astex Nom Prenom Etablissement" =E0 ***@univ-orleans.fr

[C Y]

Heh - maddeningly enough, it seems to be the rule that the most
interesting languages have the least support. Lisp had the misfortune
to be just sufficiently unpopular in the early to mid ninties that it
never got the plethera of graphics libraries that other languages got,
and that had proved difficult to remedy. Doing basic interfacing to
library graphics is doable, but doing a "universal" solution is very
hard. And nowadays a universal soultion isn't enough - has to look
good and include a lot of functionality.

McCLIM is basically the last best hope for Lisp GUI programming to take
off in a major way (TRUE lisp graphics programming, where the interface
logic is defined in lisp without being closely tied to any single
non-lisp toolkit). I'd like to help push that forward but it's not a
simple task and I need both more knowledge and time. Being an eternal
optimist about such things I'm hoping it will eventually come to pass
:-).

But this is exciting for two reasons - the Windows graphics yes, but
SBCL was never designed to run on Windows at all and the port is highly
non-trivial. So its having progressed that far is quite exciting.
That was the "wow" part ;-).

Cheers,
Cliff

Post by Page, Bill

Post by C Y
WOW. I did not know things had progressed that far.
Exciting times.

Post by root
http://www.dridus.com/~nyef/messagebox-goodness.png
sbcl on windows popping up a native windows messagebox

Lisp pop-ups on Windows is exciting?
... oh, I am sooo depressed ...
;)
Bill Page.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

[Bill Page]

Post by Page, Bill
They can do that privately in their own source code environments
or they can do it more publicly via the Axiom Wiki. All types
of Axiom-related programming are now possible through the web
including Lisp, Boot, Spad, Aldor and Axiom interpreter scripts.

For a beginner these are too many languages to choose from.
People need guidance when to use which, and which language will
be supported on the long run. (Nobody wants to invest time in a
language that will soon be discontinued.)

Isn't that what they said about Fortran? :)

As far as I am concerned none of these languages should be
discontinued. They are all essential to the way Axiom is
built. (Tim Daly disagrees about Boot, but that is a different
story.)

Learning Lisp is one thing in itself. If you program at all, you
should at least know something about Lisp.

Learning Axiom interpreter scripts is essential for all but
trivial use of Axiom.

Learning Spad is essential for Axiom library programming.

Learning Boot is simple because it is essentially a simplified
form of Spad - an intermediate language between Lisp and Spad.
Boot is used only internally in the Axiom compiler and interpreter.

I think that it is the nature of Axiom that it's development
environment can not be made much simpler than this. There is
the old saying: Everything should be as simple as possible,
but not simpler. :)

Regards,
Bill Page.

[Ralf Hemmecke]

Dear Bill,

I know it's a stupid question for a living thing like MathAction, but
since I am usually offline when I work on Axiom, I would be happy to
have a local copy of all the information on my computer. Is there any
hope to get something like this together with a possible daily
synchronization?

Ralf

[Ralf Hemmecke]

Post by Bill Page

Post by Page, Bill
They can do that privately in their own source code environments
or they can do it more publicly via the Axiom Wiki. All types
of Axiom-related programming are now possible through the web
including Lisp, Boot, Spad, Aldor and Axiom interpreter scripts.

For a beginner these are too many languages to choose from.
People need guidance when to use which, and which language will
be supported on the long run. (Nobody wants to invest time in a
language that will soon be discontinued.)

Isn't that what they said about Fortran? :)
As far as I am concerned none of these languages should be
discontinued. They are all essential to the way Axiom is
built. (Tim Daly disagrees about Boot, but that is a different
story.)

Well, I think I rather agree with Matthias and Tim. The fewer languages
I have to learn in order to get some mathematical stuff running, the better.

Boot is something that is maybe a bit easier to learn than LISP, but
it is not essential for Axiom in the long run. But I would rather have
replaced BOOT by Aldor instead of LISP if this were possible.

Post by Bill Page
Learning Lisp is one thing in itself. If you program at all, you
should at least know something about Lisp.

Yes, I know some basics in LISP, but I would not say I can speak it
fluently. And although LISP is at the moment very important for Axiom,
wouldn't it make sense for the future to replace more and more LISP by
some higher level language? I consider LISP a kind of assembler
language. Sure one can do all kinds of stuff with it, but Axiom actually
exists because it is not LISP. Axiom provides a very nice language
SPAD/Aldor. Anything below that is just hairy details for
axiom-developers/maintainers. And if these hairy details could be made
less hairy then that is certainly better. It is also better in view of
getting more people become axiom-developers. As Matthias said, a new
person just doesn't easily know where to start and thus is lost as an
axiom-developer.

So making the build process simpler is essential to accelerate the
development.

Post by Bill Page
Learning Axiom interpreter scripts is essential for all but
trivial use of Axiom.

I hope some day we will just have Aldor and Bnatural (which I think
would be a library written in Aldor).

Post by Bill Page
Learning Spad is essential for Axiom library programming.

Right, but unfortunately SPAD is not Aldor. So which language to choose?
Right, spad and aldor are very much the same, but unfortunately there
are some tiny differences. It would make me somehow happy if Axiom
states somewhere that SPAD is deprecated and for new code Aldor should
be preferred.

Post by Bill Page
Learning Boot is simple because it is essentially a simplified
form of Spad - an intermediate language between Lisp and Spad.
Boot is used only internally in the Axiom compiler and interpreter.

Yes, Boot is internal, and until I really want to learn how the compiler
and interpreter work I don't learn it. Well, I think it would also lead
to a paragraph in the developer's guide. What language is used for what
internally. Tim, is there already such a paragraph somewhere?

Post by Bill Page
I think that it is the nature of Axiom that it's development
environment can not be made much simpler than this. There is
the old saying: Everything should be as simple as possible,
but not simpler. :)

As simple as possible: Axiom has a kernel in written in C or LISP and
the rest is Aldor. Bill, would you consider that too simple?

OK, I agree, Axiom has many more languages:
(La)TeX
awk
sh
Makefile
noweb
perl(?)
awk
C
python(?)
etc...

But these languages are existing languages in their own right. Axiom
adds BOOT, SPAD, the Interpreter language, Aldor. Aldor could even be
seen to belong to the list above.

So what Axiom should add is a nice mathematical interface. Type
mathematics, get out mathematics. Bnatural would be a first approach to
this. Hopefully there will be some timeslot in the near future where
someone could implement this.

Best regards
Ralf

[root]

Post by Ralf Hemmecke
As simple as possible: Axiom has a kernel in written in C or LISP and
the rest is Aldor. Bill, would you consider that too simple?

AARRGGGHHH! C is one of the most non-portable languages I know.
an #ifdef here, an #ifdef there, here a #else, there #define,
under there 3 #includes with 17 subincludes, long, long long,
double long, uint_64, spanned doubles, ....

i've spent half my life moving C programs around and i just spent a
few days this past week moving 30 year old C programs to the MAC.
Half a million lines of lisp code move without one #+ or compiler
conditional. 500 lines of C take 3 days. Only the axiom C code
won't work on windows.

porting code has been a very large percentage of my professional life
and C has been the largest pain. The only issues I run into with lisp
is changing dialects (maclisp -> vmlisp -> common lisp) but now that
common lisp is widely avaiable as a standard language the porting
issues have evaporated.

and you couldn't do axiom in C anyway. show me a C program that reads
data, creates a C program, compiles it, links it, and runs it to call
other C programs.... or one that can do a closure over the stack. and
not just in principle but in practice.

please, no more C code.

t

[C Y]

Post by Jay Belanger

Post by C Y
Sorry if we're not pulling our weight Tim

Was the original post a comment about people not pulling their
weight?

Not really. I read it (just my interpretation) as Tim being frustrated
with so many opinions without accompanying code, and I'm certainly
guilty of that. So that was me acknowledging that, rather than a
response directly to his original email. Like when your teacher
rebukes the whole class generally but you know you've been doing
whatever it is everyone's getting rebuked for ;-).

Post by Jay Belanger
I didn't think so, but regardless, I need to do something.
I can now start on EAxiom for Cliff.

Wooooo hooooooo!

Post by Jay Belanger
Also, I seem to recall seeing a package to do Lie symmetry
analysis of PDEs in Axiom, but I can't come across it again.
(Googling "Axiom" and anything mathematical doesn't always
give results about the CAS.) What, if anything, is out there?

Maybe you are thinking of JET?
http://www.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/groups/compalg/seiler/Papers/HTML/Axiom.html
If so, good news - the author of the JET environment recently gave me
permission to release an older version of his code he was able to
locate! I have it on my home machine but with one thing and another I
haven't gotten it online yet (I need to attach copyright and license
info). It's not documented unfortunately, and I don't know about the
copyright on his paper or whether he would be willing to have us use it
if he does still have it, but reading the paper and proceeding from
there with the code is probably a lot better than starting from
scratch!

I'll try and get that code uploaded tomorrow, maybe on the Axiom wiki
if I can find a good place. This code isn't any kind of pamphlet file
and I have no documentation to turn it into one, but it's a start.

Probably also worth following up on is subsequent work the author did
in Mupad on this subject - apparently quite a lot of progress was made.

Cheers,
Cliff

__________________________________________________
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Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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[root]

Post by C Y

Post by Jay Belanger

Post by C Y
Sorry if we're not pulling our weight Tim

Was the original post a comment about people not pulling their
weight?

Not really. I read it (just my interpretation) as Tim being frustrated
with so many opinions without accompanying code, and I'm certainly
guilty of that. So that was me acknowledging that, rather than a
response directly to his original email. Like when your teacher
rebukes the whole class generally but you know you've been doing
whatever it is everyone's getting rebuked for ;-).

well, it's only my opinion but what i think tim meant was that
you're all appearing to "ask permission" and you don't need to.

this is free code, it isn't "my" code. i don't own it, i don't
(try to) control it, and so complaining to me that something is
"wrong" is like sending me a note that code YOU wrote on your
desktop is wrong... so? fix it.

i realize that i'm standing on the "master copy" but, like the
linux project, somebody has to organize the chaos. but nobody
asks linus if they can hack device drivers or anything else.
they just do it, show that it works, put out running code,
and then get a whole lot of flak about it. eventually it gets
improved and sent up the chain to get put in the kernel.

i'm not concerned about "pulling weight"... everybody does what
they can, they want to, they have time for... i'm just a bit of
a fanatic about it so i feel pressured to fix broken things.

and i'm certainly not in a position to rebuke anyone. nor do i
feel the need to. rebuking people would arise from the feeling
that i was in a position of power and trying to control everyone.
which i'm not and i'm not.

the bottom line is.... you have a whole CD full of code and a
whole world listening... and an opportunity to change the world.
whatcha gonna do about it?

t

[Jay Belanger]

C Y <***@yahoo.com> writes:
...

Post by C Y

Post by Jay Belanger
Also, I seem to recall seeing a package to do Lie symmetry
analysis of PDEs in Axiom, but I can't come across it again.
(Googling "Axiom" and anything mathematical doesn't always
give results about the CAS.) What, if anything, is out there?

Maybe you are thinking of JET?
http://www.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/groups/compalg/seiler/Papers/HTML/Axiom.html

No; I'll look around some more for what I was thinking of.

Post by C Y
If so, good news - the author of the JET environment recently gave me
permission to release an older version of his code he was able to
locate!

That is good news! I've helped Werner a bit (a very little bit) with
his PDE stuff for MuPAD, it'll be nice to have something similar for
Axiom.

Post by C Y
I'll try and get that code uploaded tomorrow, maybe on the Axiom wiki
if I can find a good place. This code isn't any kind of pamphlet file
and I have no documentation to turn it into one, but it's a start.

I'll look at it when it gets up.
Also, that reminds me, I really need to learn noweb about now.

Jay

[Jay Belanger]

C Y <***@yahoo.com> writes:
...

Post by C Y

Post by Jay Belanger
Also, I seem to recall seeing a package to do Lie symmetry
analysis of PDEs in Axiom, but I can't come across it again.
(Googling "Axiom" and anything mathematical doesn't always
give results about the CAS.) What, if anything, is out there?

Maybe you are thinking of JET?
http://www.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/groups/compalg/seiler/Papers/HTML/Axiom.html
If so, good news - the author of the JET environment recently gave me
permission to release an older version of his code he was able to
locate!

I can't seem to find the project that I was thinking of, but you've
managed to (here and in the other message) come up with stuff better
than what I was looking for. Pretty neat.

Jay

[Bill Page]

Post by Ralf Hemmecke
...
I somehow have the impression that the FAQ section is a bit
unwritten and does not really invite people to put in their
questions that will perhaps be answered by somebody who can.
Bill, what do you think about making it more explicit on the
FAQ wiki that people should put their questions there? The
axiom-developer list is great, but questions and answers get
burried easily.

Yes, you are right that the current FAQ on the Axiom Wiki is
just cobbled together from other sources (i.e. "unwritten" in
a sense). I think it is a good idea to encourage people to
submit questions there. But of course we do encourage people to
submit questions anywhere on the wiki - it is an entirely open
web site. What we need most I think is for someone to explicitly
take on the task of helping to maintain and develop the FAQ.
It is easy for anyone who has a browser to do this from anywhere
in the world.

Post by Ralf Hemmecke
Matthias and anyone else who is listening, tell your critisism.
We all can learn from it and probably (try to) improve.

Absolutely right!

Regards,
Bill Page.

[Bill Page]

Post by Ralf Hemmecke
I know it's a stupid question for a living thing like MathAction,
but since I am usually offline when I work on Axiom, I would be
happy to have a local copy of all the information on my computer.
Is there any hope to get something like this together with a
possible daily synchronization?

I think that is an **excellect** question! In fact we anticipated
such a possibility in the original design of MathAction. This is
part of what Tim Daly calls the Doyen idea.

Installing MathAction locally is certainly possible but the setup
is a little complex. So far as I know only two other Axiom
developers have done this. One is Bob McElrath - the developer
of the LaTeX extensions for Zwiki on which MathAction is based.
The other developer who has installed MathAxtion locally is Hans
Peter Wuermli.

It would be good first to review:

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/MathAction

and then read:

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/InstallingMathAction

(Note: Some of the information here is a little out of date.)

I would be very happy to help you set this up locally for your
own use. As part of the process, this would allow me to improve
the How-To documentation.

Regards,
Bill Page.

[Martin Rubey]

Dear Bill,

Post by Bill Page

I would be happy to have a local copy of all the information on my
computer.

I think that is an **excellect** question!

you do realize that I asked for a snapshot of the contents of MathAction
already several times?

Martin

[Bill Page]

Martin,

Post by Martin Rubey

Post by Bill Page

I would be happy to have a local copy of all the information
on my computer.

I think that is an **excellect** question!

you do realize that I asked for a snapshot of the contents of
MathAction already several times?

I did not know what you meant by "snapshot". I don't think
it is possible simply to take a snapshot of a wiki. It is
necessary to install all of the associated software in order
to view the contents.

I would be glad to help you do this.

Regards,
Bill Page.

[Bill Page]

... it is not so easy for non English-speaking people to
modify texts in English, as one (well, at least me :-) is
always frightened to introduce bad syntax, incorrect words
so that "improving" might appear "corrupting" to English-
speaking readers (even if the scientific contents is
improved).

My opinion is that it is highest priority to improve the
scientific contents even if the quality of the English is not
perfect. You will notice that even though English is my first
language, I still manage occasionally to introduce bad syntax
and incorrect words. :) Please do not let that stop you from
making improvements to the content. If there is some concern
then someone else can make improvements to your English.

BTW, is it possible easily with Plone to have bi(multi-)lingual
pages, for example so that one could switch from English to
French by clicking on a flag or button in the current page ?

Yes this is possible in Plone. Plone has a feature called I18N
support which enables correct translations of fixed text such
as menus and headings as well as multi-lingual documents, i.e.
one document that appears in multiple versions - one version
for each language. The version shown to the user depends on
the language setting of the browser.

http://www.contentmanagementsoftware.info/plone/I18NLayer
http://www.contentmanagementsoftware.info/plone/I18NFolder
http://www.contentmanagementsoftware.info/plone/LinguaPlone

This could solve partly the problem, maybe?

Yes. The axiom-developer.org sever has two different websites
that support Axiom: one is called the Axiom Wiki and it is based
only on Zope and ZWiki (with extensions for LaTeX and Axiom).
The Axiom Wiki has only limited support for translations of some
of the fixed text such as menus and headings.

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org

The other website is called the Axiom Portal and it is based on
Plone and Zwiki (with the same extensions).

http://portal.axiom-developer.org

Right now the I18N product for Plone have not yet been installed.
But if you or anyone else would like to experiment with multi-
lingual documents on the Axiom Portal, I would be glad to install
the I18N package. I would also be happy to try to contribute to
such documents.

Regards,
Bill Page.

[Bill Page]

Martin,

I thought a little more about your request and I also saw that
planetmath.org does offer a "static snapshot" download based
on wget. Is this what you meant? If so, you can create such a
snapshot via the command:

wget --mirror --convert-links --backup-converted \
--html-extension \
http://wiki.axiom-developer.org

Or, with less typing:

wget -m -k -K -E http://www.gnu.org

For more information see the wget documentation (man wget
or http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html)

But you should note that this could take a very long time
depending on the speed of your internet connection!

If this format is what you mean by "snapshot" and you do think
that this would be useful, then we can do the same thing as is
done on planetmath - create a compressed tarball, say once per
week, and provide a link for people to download it. But even
compressed this is likely to be quite large - my guess: about
250 Mbytes. I will let you know once my current download
completes and I create the actual compressed file.

What this would allow people to do is to have a local copy
of all the pages on the Axiom Wiki as they existed at the
time the snapshot was taken, but of course it would not allow
any editing or running of Axiom etc.

I still think installing MathAction locally is the better
choice.

Regards,
Bill Page.

Post by Bill Page

Post by Martin Rubey

Post by Bill Page

I would be happy to have a local copy of all the information
on my computer.

I think that is an **excellect** question!

you do realize that I asked for a snapshot of the contents of
MathAction already several times?

I did not know what you meant by "snapshot". I don't think
it is possible simply to take a snapshot of a wiki. It is
necessary to install all of the associated software in order
to view the contents.
I would be glad to help you do this.

[Bill Page]

Martin,

Post by Bill Page
I thought a little more about your request and I also saw that
planetmath.org does offer a "static snapshot" download based
on wget. Is this what you meant? If so, you can create such a
...
wget -m -k -K -E http://wiki.axiom-developer.org
For more information see the wget documentation (man wget
or http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html)
But you should note that this could take a very long time
depending on the speed of your internet connection!
If this format is what you mean by "snapshot" and you do think
that this would be useful, then we can do the same thing as is
done on planetmath - create a compressed tarball, say once per
week, and provide a link for people to download it. But even
compressed this is likely to be quite large - my guess: about
250 Mbytes. I will let you know once my current download
completes and I create the actual compressed file.

Running locally on the axiom-developer.org server (no network
delays), the above wget command took about 2 hours to complete!

The tarball turns out to be 197.7 Mbytes - about a 40 minute
download at 80 KB/sec. You can download it here:

http://page.axiom-developer.org/axiom-snapshot.tar.gz

Use

% mkdir snapshot
% cd snapshot
% tar xzf axiom-snapshot.tar.gz

to expand the archive into a convenient directory, e.g. snapshot

Then use a browser to access the local file:

.../snapshot/wiki.axiom-developer.org/FrontPage.html

Most of the links have been converted to local links. The
exceptions are things that produce dynamic results such as
search, edit, etc. These still link to the Axiom Wiki.

Please let me know if you think this might be useful. If it
is, then we can provide a link on the wiki to download it
and I can also arrange to have it updated once per week.

Regards,
Bill Page.

[Page, Bill]

Post by m***@univ-orleans.fr
...
I created SandBoxLaTeX and tried to put some accented letters
in it,
http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/SandBoxLaTeX#bottom
could you tell me if they are correctly displayed on English
configuration?

Yes, the text looks fine to me with FireFox 1.5 and IE 6 sp2 on
Windows XP.

Post by m***@univ-orleans.fr

Post by Bill Page
The other website is called the Axiom Portal and it is based on
Plone and Zwiki (with the same extensions).
http://portal.axiom-developer.org
Right now the I18N product for Plone has not yet been installed.
But if you or anyone else would like to experiment with
multi-lingual documents on the Axiom Portal, I would be glad to
install the I18N package. I would also be happy to try to
contribute to such documents.

Great. Yes, I would be very happy to experiment it, if you
were so kind to install it

Ok, I will let you know as soon as it is available.

Regards,
Bill Page.

[Page, Bill]

Post by m***@univ-orleans.fr
...

Post by Bill Page
The other website is called the Axiom Portal and it is based on
Plone and Zwiki (with the same extensions).
http://portal.axiom-developer.org
Right now the I18N product for Plone have not yet been
installed. But if you or anyone else would like to experiment
with multi-lingual documents on the Axiom Portal, I would be
glad to install the I18N package. I would also be happy to try
to contribute to such documents.

Great. Yes, I would be very happy to experiment it, if you
were so kind to install it

Ok, I have now installed the so called I18NLayer in Plone. Here
is an example of bi-lingual document.

http://portal.axiom-developer.org/Members/billpage/i18Ntest

It will appear in French if your browser language is set to
French, E.g. in FireFox click:

Tools/Options/Advanced/General/Edit Languages

and French (fr) is the top language. Or in English if (en) is
the top language on the list. Note: If you wonder about the
quality of the translations :), they were created from the
English via Altavista BabelFish. Please feel free to correct
and improve it.

Notice the select-box in the bottom-left corner of the page.
This allows you to select another translation, e.g. German.

If you are logged into the Axiom Portal then you will also
be able to create new translations of this document in other
languages.

After logging in, you can create new multi-lingual documents
in your "Mes documents' folder. Click "Ajout d'un élément" and
choose "I18NLayer" and just fill-in the blanks.

Please let me know if you have any questions about this. I will
try to answer, but I have to admit that I do not have a lot of
experience with this feature of Plone.

Regards,
Bill Page.