Re: [Sbcl-devel] patch: Removing unused symbols in unix

[Daniel B. <da...@te...>]

"Perry E. Metzger" <pe...@pi...> writes:

> Azimuth <az...@sa...> writes:
>> sb-unix:unix-fcntl wasn't being used, so it has been removed.
>
> does this mean you can no longer access the fnctl system call?

SB-UNIX is an internals-only package not intended for public
consumption, so if SBCL itself is not needing to call fcntl() from
Lisp code, unix-fcntl is a valid target for removal.

For public, documented (well, documentable; actual English is a bit
thin on the ground) access to Unix system calls and other facilities,
look instead at the SB-POSIX contrib package (contrib/sb-posix/README
is a good place to start).

> (forgive my ignorance -- I'm a newbie around here.)

This is the kind of stuff that we really ought to write down somewhere
sane.  To find that out you'd have had to look at
doc/FOR-CMUCL-DEVELOPERS, or to check the documentation string for the
SB-UNIX package.  Which latter place is, I suppose, in theory a pretty
good place to hang this information, I guess, but it really wouldn't
have occured to me at least to look there.

CL-USER> (documentation (find-package :sb-unix) t)
"private: a wrapper layer for SBCL itself to use when talking
with an underlying Unix-y operating system.
This was a public package in CMU CL, but that was different.
CMU CL's UNIX package tried to provide a comprehensive,
stable Unix interface suitable for the end user.
This package only tries to implement what happens to be
needed by the current implementation of SBCL, and makes
no guarantees of interface stability."


-dan

-- 
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