Hi folks,
Reading planet-lisp this morning, I stumbled upon Bill Clementsons
blog entry about STARTER-PACK by Edi Weitz, which provides a nice
starting point for some of the more common lisp libraries. Edi has
built his package according to his liking, which influences the choice
of Lisp libraries as well as the underlying foundation, i.e. Windows
and Lispworks (Bill seems to have ported it to Mac/LW).
I like that idea very much as a way to take a step towards "Lisp with
batteries included" (title of Bill's blog post). For Debian Linux
users, I would like to see a different approach, more in line with
what a user of that OS would expect: establish a cl-task package that
depends on those packages somebody (i.e. the CL maintainers in Debian)
sees fit to have as standard CL packages available.
Now, before I'm going to discuss that idea with the current
maintainers (I think Peter van Eynde is the man in charge, mainly), I
would like some feedback on the general idea and on the packages to
include. Any suggestions?
Holger
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and let me tell you, when you're talking millions of bits, it gets
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faster (we provided you with some remarkable cushioning functions that
prevent damage to your data). Non-ADSL? They use helium. That's why
it's more expensive." -- seen on WTF
I think the main problem with so-called "batteries included" Lisp
packages is the difficulty in keeping track of the constant
development of many Lisp libraries. It seems to me that many libraries
in the Lisp world are still in an early phase and thus change quite
frequently; it's not uncommon to have several versions of the same
library to satisfy the dependencies of various other libraries and
applications... it would be good to have a lisp-aware "apt" like
software, i.e. a system for managing dependencies, making it easy to
keep different versions of libraries, and updating them when needed...
and then maybe build a batteries included package on top of that.
I don't know whether such a thing already exists, or if an existing
software can be adapted to the purpose but... I think it would be
good.
Just my opinion...
On 4963 September 1993, ·············@gmail.com wrote:
> I think the main problem with so-called "batteries included" Lisp
> packages is the difficulty in keeping track of the constant
> development of many Lisp libraries.
Hah. You know that Debian stable is quite regularly referred to as
Debian 'stale'? That's hardly a problem.
> It seems to me that many libraries in the Lisp world are still in an
> early phase and thus change quite frequently; [...]
This might be a criterion to avoid such libraries in the first place
when trying to come up with a set of "standard libraries" for
inclusion for lisp newbies. I mean, being standard and being in a
fluent state seems quite contradictory to me. On the other hand,
Debian did ship non-stable versions of software in the past (I
remember that some of the packages I use regularly were severely
broken in past Debian stable versions), so ...
Holger
--
--- http://hillview.bugwriter.net/ ---
"Hey sister, have you heard?
Some people stand like trees, without a word
and what that means is that some people don't talk."
-- Violent Femmes, "Never tell"
Le Wed, 04 Apr 2007 21:00:26 +0200, Holger Schauer a écrit:
>> I think the main problem with so-called "batteries included" Lisp
>> packages is the difficulty in keeping track of the constant
>> development of many Lisp libraries.
Well, that's the job of package maintainers. The pleasure with Debian is
that the job has to be made only once, and then all users benefit from
it.
> Hah. You know that Debian stable is quite regularly referred to as
> Debian 'stale'? That's hardly a problem.
Well, there's not only stable in Debian. Most developers will use either
testing, unstable or a mix of the two.
>> It seems to me that many libraries in the Lisp world are still in an
>> early phase and thus change quite frequently; [...]
> This might be a criterion to avoid such libraries in the first place
> when trying to come up with a set of "standard libraries" for
> inclusion for lisp newbies.
Obviously. A Common Lisp task should bring fairly stable packages that
are of general interest, like CL-PPCRE, Hunchentoot, SERIES, Iterate,
CL-SQL, CL-FAD, CL-WHO, LML2, SLIME, trivial-sockets, CFFI, maybe CL-SDL
or McCLIM.
Quickly,
Pierre
--
···········@levallois.eu.org
OpenPGP 0xD9D50D8A
Holger Schauer wrote:
...
> I like that idea very much as a way to take a step towards "Lisp with
> batteries included" (title of Bill's blog post). For Debian Linux
> users, I would like to see a different approach, more in line with
> what a user of that OS would expect: establish a cl-task package that
> depends on those packages somebody (i.e. the CL maintainers in Debian)
> sees fit to have as standard CL packages available.
...
> Any suggestions?
Help improve ASDF-install and cliki:
http://www.cliki.net/ASDF-Install
They seem to be working towards the same goals (readily installed set of
libraries), but with a cross-platform approach.
My $0.02
- Daniel
D Herring wrote:
> Holger Schauer wrote:
> ...
>
>> I like that idea very much as a way to take a step towards "Lisp with
>> batteries included" (title of Bill's blog post). For Debian Linux
>> users, I would like to see a different approach, more in line with
>> what a user of that OS would expect: establish a cl-task package that
>> depends on those packages somebody (i.e. the CL maintainers in Debian)
>> sees fit to have as standard CL packages available.
>
> ...
>
>> Any suggestions?
>
>
> Help improve ASDF-install and cliki:
> http://www.cliki.net/ASDF-Install
>
> They seem to be working towards the same goals (readily installed set of
> libraries), but with a cross-platform approach.
>
> My $0.02
My $200 (my hourly rate) is that I wasted an hour trying to get
ASDF-Install installed (possibly the funniest thing I have ever written)
and after successfully completing Edi's thousand-line ASDF-install
install (not a typo) instructions succeeded -- in hanging my Lisp.
Fifteen tedious minutes later I had cl-s3 and its kabillion dependencies
built and humming by converting all the .Asd's into ACL projects.
hth,kxo
--
"As long as algebra is taught in school,
there will be prayer in school." - Cokie Roberts
"Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra."
- Fran Lebowitz
"I'm an algebra liar. I figure two good lies make a positive."
- Tim Allen
"Algebra is the metaphysics of arithmetic." - John Ray
http://www.theoryyalgebra.com/
On 4964 September 1993, D. Herring wrote:
> Holger Schauer wrote:
>> I like that idea very much as a way to take a step towards "Lisp with
>> batteries included" (title of Bill's blog post). For Debian Linux
>> users, I would like to see a different approach, more in line with
>> what a user of that OS would expect: establish a cl-task package that
>> depends on those packages somebody (i.e. the CL maintainers in Debian)
>> sees fit to have as standard CL packages available.
> Help improve ASDF-install and cliki:
> http://www.cliki.net/ASDF-Install
> They seem to be working towards the same goals (readily installed set
> of libraries), but with a cross-platform approach.
First of all, from what I understand ASDF-install is closer to Debians
apt-get, i.e. it's a tool to say: Install <system>. This is already
possible for the various cl-*-packages in Debian (and Ubuntu, btw). A
cl-task package solves a different problem: what systems should be
available by default. As a consequence, a CL-TASK package should
probably provide only one solution (library) for some problem, not
multiple (as is the case with ASDF-install).
Next, I don't use ASDF-install for the same reasons that I don't use
CPAN and similar tools[1]: I like to have the package system of the OS
as the only way to install software. On reason for that is that I can
be fairly certain of the state of the software that's going to be
installed because of the work of the Debian maintainers. They are
targetting stability and interoperability of packages, which I don't
think is a requirement for providing packages via ASDF-install.
Holger
Footnotes:
[1] I do use the XEmacs package system, but as I am compiling XEmacs
from sources myself anyway, that's a different issue.
--
--- http://hillview.bugwriter.net/ ---
"If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog? Five?
No! Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."
-- Abraham Lincoln, explaining the difference between lexical
scoping and dynamic scoping (found by F.R.Rideau)