[armedbear-devel] Patches for metatilities-base and lift

[Alessio Stalla]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 3:18 PM, Mark Evenson <evenson at panix.com> wrote:
> On 3/22/11 15:08 , Alessio Stalla wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 2:57 PM, Zach Beane<xach at xach.com>  wrote:
>>> I don't like the idea of interceding and patching after download
>>> very much.
>>
>> For what it's worth, I don't like it either.
>
> Noted.
>
>> For it to work reliably we'd need to keep ABCL and Quicklisp
>> releases in sync, and tell users to update both at the same time.
>
> Keeping Quicklisp packages working with ABCL trunk and the most recent
> release would not be that much additional effort.  As we patch ABCL to
> get more systems running, we can patch the packages with the necessary
> conditionals that call ERROR with a message stating that things won't
> work out.

For people who use trunk and update it regularly, sure. But once trunk
is crystallized into a release, there will be users who won't update
it at least till the next release, ~2 months later. If in the meantime
a new Quicklisp release comes out, those users might not be able to
use it because the patches included in ABCL could break.

>> After all, users presently cannot use those libraries on ABCL,
>> Quicklisp or not. If someone really needs to use them ASAP, (s)he
>> will need to complain to the library author.
>
> With the patches [that I am seemingly accumulating][1] there is a lot of
> packages that can work with ABCL than is apparent from merely trying to
> use Quicklisp (or ASDF-INSTALL).  But which patch is needed in what
> situation is not always that easy to tell.  I try to post to
> armedbear-devel information about the latest version, but one might have
> to comb the archives to figure things out.

Maybe we could have a page on the ABCL wiki containing such
information, updated more or less regularly. Library maintainers could
be simply pointed at that page and encouraged to patch their libraries
accordingly. If you like the idea, I can start working on it.

Alessio