Re: [cclan-list] Next steps

[Christophe R. <cs...@ca...>]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2002 at 10:50:23AM +0100, Peter Van Eynde wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 03:09:05PM +0000, Daniel Barlow wrote:
> > - on the other hand, having all this stuff apt-gettable can 
> >   absolutely rock if you _do_ have a conventional debian setup
> 
> Hear, hear. I needed some db access from lisp. A quick apt-get
> cl-uncommonsql later I was talking to the postgresql db. It was so
> painless I was impressed.

This is certainly true. However, the current difficulty involved in
turning a bit of lisp code into a debian package puts a certain burden
on cCLan "maintainers" (for want of a better term), as can be seen by
the fact that packages don't get updated with any kind of
alacrity. For some (infix, split-sequence) this doesn't matter so
much, as the code is non-volatile anyway; other packages may not be in
such a comfortable position.
 
> > What are other people's experience?  You can see from this my
> > motivations for vn-cclan (asdf and tar files, decentralised network),
> > but so few people have even commented on it that I'm wondering if
> > reality is significantly different for others.  Is current cclan
> > working perfectly for you guys?
> 
> I think for a debian user it is close to working. IMHO other systems
> lack apt-get type functionality too much. I feel no desire to
> reimplement apt-get just to satify a redhat user. Sorry.

We don't need to reimplement apt-get. The crufty horrible code that I
wrote to turn infix into a debian package doesn't need to know very
much at all about how debian does things -- it calls out to
dpkg-buildpackage to do the difficult work. I don't see a problem with
doing this for the rpm format -- certainly, it's no big deal, except
that I know very little about the rpm format.

The other problem with making rpms is that it still requires that the
installed lisp programs follow the same kind of policy as the debian
one (it doesn't have to be exactly the same, but it does have to be
known, so that the postinst script or equivalent can call out to
common-lisp-controller or equivalent to ask for a recompile). This,
I'd have thought, is the major barrier to distributing packages in rpm
format; and in a sense it's out of our hands (unless someone on this
list is employed by a Linux distributor :)

That said, there was a certain amount of feedback way back when that
.deb format wasn't terribly useful to some people, and that .tar.gz
might be preferable. Well, I think that the .tar.gzs generated by
asdf/layered code currently are quite good (you even get autogenerated
install instructions :) -- they're useable, even if they don't have
the utter convenience of the current debian packages. And if we can
autogenerate debs from them, too (note that I used asdf, with a .asd
file, to generate a common-lisp-controller/mk-defsystem .deb, though
admittedly I didn't try to generate the mk- .system but used the old
one I had lying around) then I think that the cost of maintenance is
also lowered, which might induce more timely releases into the cCLan
system -- I want to make it easy for authors to release code to the
wide world through us, rather than have us go out and pick things up
ourselves...

Anyway, that's my ramble over. More code!

Christophe
-- 
Jesus College, Cambridge, CB5 8BL                           +44 1223 510 299
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