Re: ffcall: now part of clisp?

[Hoehle, Joerg-C. <Joe...@t-...>]

Peter Van Eynde asked:
>As future [Debian] maintainer of ffcall I noticed that the latest=20
>release of this library (1.10 from=20
>http://www.haible.de/bruno/packages->ffcall.html) does not=20
>seem to have been updated with the changes from clisp.

>Will there be a future ffcall release or should I just base=20
>the ffcall library on the ffcall part of clisp?
>
>Groetjes, Peter

I don't know whether Bruno answered separately.  Here's my opinion from
what I remember Bruno told me when I raised the topic years ago.

o ffcall is used by other packages (perhaps not in Debian), IIRC some
Smalltalk implementation uses it (used it? -- or do I mix things up with
libsigsegv?).
Therefore it would IMHO be a bad idea to keep it completely inside the
CLISP package.

OTOH, CLISP's configure expects ffcall to be right there in the source
tree. I wonder if it's worth the effort to change that and have Debian
clisp builds depend on some ffcall-dev package.

o There's no other project page for ffcall than the one you mention.

o In particular, the only current online ffcall source is the one within
the CLISP CVS tree at sourceforge (or am I messing state again with
libsigsegv).
I don't know whether Bruno maintains a private copy of the source.

o If that CVS tree is newer than any package, then it means that the
maintainer exhibits symptoms of "too many things to do and maintain",
e.g. Bruno Haible is likely too busy to make a new release.  Obviously
there has not been too much pressure from ffcall users to urge a new
official release.

Regards,
	Jorg Hohle.