Re: [Sbcl-devel] [WEBPAGE PATCH] windows version

[Brian M. <br...@ma...>]

On Oct 18, 2008, at 1:13 PM, Drew Crampsie wrote:

> I support a lot of new lispers, and one of the biggest issues i have
> is people using the packages from their distribution and complaining
> they can't make things (slime etc) work.
>
> The first thing I tell them is to purge all distro related lisp and
> start again. We should not endorse a method of installation that is
> broken by design (debian and gentoo with clc), broken due to age
> (centos) or just plain broken.

I would definitely agree with this, but...

> If anything, i'd prefer to see the exact opposite message. 'SBCL
> developers suggest installing SBCL and SLIME from CVS"

I don't think installing SBCL from CVS is a good recommendation at  
all, unless you need a fix sooner than the next release.

Unfortunately there's no alternative to "SLIME from CVS" due to the  
lack of interest in SLIME developers in making a version of SLIME  
available that actually purports to work. So, I'd prefer something  
along the lines of the following:

"SBCL developers suggest installing the latest monthly release of  
SBCL. If no binary is available for the latest release on your  
platform, we suggest building it from source (link to instructions).  
The latest release of SBCL is unlikely to work with any snapshot of  
SLIME that is older than <date of last SBCL release>. If a more recent  
snapshot of SLIME fails to work, send acerbic mail to sli...@co... 
."

--
Brian Mastenbrook
br...@ma...
http://brian.mastenbrook.net/