[alexandria-devel] Maintenance

[Michael Weber]

On Mar 3, 2010, at 09:02 , Attila Lendvai wrote:

> a portable installer that can automatically check out and update
> source repositories would help a lot though! but that's a different
> story...

What does "portable" mean?  Between Lisps or between OSes?

Also, what if you install lisp software which depends on non-lisp tools provided by the OS/distribution, say tar or gnupg?  Ideally, you want to be able to express such dependencies as well.  This is where, e.g., the python and ruby library installers fail...

Two options present themselves:
* Leave software installation to the OS mechanism entirely, i.e., also the Lisp stuff.  That's basically something like CLC.

* Integrate the various distribution mechanisms (apt, rpm, yast, macports, fink, ...) into a lisp solution.  This seems like a lot of tedious work, and it's not even clear what to do without administrator rights.

-- 
Cheers,
Michael