Some time ago I did exchange several emails with clisp developers to have a way to disable readline and work with pexpect (that allocates a pseudo tty) that sagemath uses to talk to maxima. Most of the discussion can be seen at http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=4B8D57D2.4080002%40gnu.org&forum_name=clisp-devel I will try to open a related bug report to upstream maxima, as maxima --help tells about the --disable-readline option, but it does nothing if using clisp as lisp backend. I use a variant (just rediffed it in fedora) of the attached patch in Mandriva.
Created attachment 595833 [details] maxima-5.27.0-clisp-noreadline.patch
I just created a maxima upstream bug report backpointing to here, and with extra information at https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3539587&group_id=4933&atid=104933
%changelog * Sun Jul 08 2012 Rex Dieter <rdieter> 5.27.0-7 - RFE: Add patch to allow disabling readline in maxima-runtime-clisp (#837142)