[armedbear-devel] Status of my work towards abcl-1.1

[Mark Evenson]

After much banging around against issues involved in merging PATHNAME 
objects when the defaults points to a JAR-PATHNAME, I think I am finally 
converging on a solution.  I have [committed a design document][1] that 
describes my approach.   The main user visible result here would be the 
successful location and retrieval from the network of the JNA component 
necessary for loading CFFI.

[1]: http://trac.common-lisp.net/armedbear/changeset/14172

The gist of the problem lies in that on non-Windows, the default DEVICE 
component is NIL, which when merged with a JAR-PATHNAME which represents 
the filesystem location of the jar archive in DEVICE, results in some 
rather bad interactions.

At the top of problem, on non-Windows when the defaults contain a 
JAR-PATHNAME:

1.  (truename #p"/") fails.

2.  Loading ASDF systems from jar files which declare dependencies on 
other ASDF systems will fail.

My proposed solution is to:

1.  On non-Windows, TRUENAME for a non-JAR-PATHNAME will set the DEVICE 
of the result to :UNSPECIFIC.

2.  Treat a JAR-PATHNAME as implicitly having a different HOST from 
normal file PATHNAME, so that the result of a merge won't fill in a 
DEVICE with the wrong "default device for the host" in the sense of the 
fourth paragraph in the [CLHS description of MERGE-PATHNAMES][2] (the 
paragraph beginning "If the PATHNAME explicitly specifies a host and not 
a device…").

[2]: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_merge_.htm

My (uncommitted) patches seem to resolve all the problems, and work on 
both Windows and non-Windows.  I still have two remaining ANSI failures 
that the changes introduced, involving the value of 
*COMPILE-FILE-TRUENAME* for which I need to rewrite the form which the 
compiler dumps pathnames from #p"/foo/bar" to the #p(:directory 
(:absolute "foo") :name "bar") form.  Somehow, the new form isn't being 
read correctly (Erik I could use your advice here).

In addition, since namestrings are no longer always roundtrippable as 
they discard an :UNSPECIFIC DEVICE, I've had to change a bit of code in 
the compiler and the Pathname implementation which assumed otherwise.

A cleaner solution would probalby have been to actually populate the 
HOST field with a type nonce, like SBCL does.  But we already use HOST 
to store information for a URL-PATHNAME.  And given the reality that we 
should release an abcl-1.1.0 as soon as realistically possible, when I 
estimated that going down this route would change much more code I opted 
for the current solution where we take a cut at "Do What I Mean" 
reasoning we could potentially retrofit this with HOST containing 
various HOST forms for abcl-1.2.x if enough objections were raised.

Comments solicited.

-- 

"A screaming comes across the sky.  It has happened before, but there is 
nothing to compare it to now."