[Maxima] documenting packages not in distribution

[Robert Dodier]

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:44 PM, John Lapeyre <pdl at johnlapeyre.com> wrote:

>  ./share/template.texi gives instructions for making
> a document and integrating it into the distribution. It's not clear
> how to do this without doing configure and make for the entire
> distribution. template.texi makes reference to template-standalone.texi,
> which is not in the source tree.

Sorry, that's an oversight. It's in CVS but not the tarball.

> It appears that code for online documentation is in
> cl-info.lisp and is called via build_index.pl.
>   ./perl build_index.pl maxima.info
> looks like it generates lisp code that makes a hash table
> giving the range of bytes in .info files for each topic.

Right.

> I guess that it would go something like this:
>  1. write your own texi documents.
>  2. convert it to info files
>  3  call ./build_info.pl mydoc.info
>  4 execute the resulting lisp code which will add entries
>  to the hash tables that are referenced by 'describe'

Yes, that seems right. Bear in mind that build_info.pl is pretty
strongly tailored to the .info files produced by maxima.texi.
The script will probably be confused by any variations.

>  There are probably other issues like getting your user info
> files into some search path.

Look at maxima --directories and see what it says for maxima-infodir.
I think you have to copy the info files there.

Let me know what does or doesn't work. I'm willing to help.

Robert Dodier