[asdf-devel] What are current plans for RMCL?

[Pascal Costanza]

Hi,

I'd like to get an idea what the current plans for RMCL are, if any. Since the switch to OS X 10.7, there is no default support for old PowerPC applications on OS X anymore, so RMCL doesn't work anymore, at least not without a major effort. Are there any plans to find a remedy for this situation? Or will RMCL effectively become deprecated?

I'm asking for the following reasons: When ASDF was changed from 1.x to 2.x, this caused some problems for RMCL, which I eventually resolved by using Common Lisp's logical pathnames for the systems I maintain (primarily Closer to MOP and ContextL). However, the current maintainers of ASDF have an unjustified very low regard for logical pathnames, which causes a lot of pain - basically, whenever a new version of a Common Lisp implementation comes bundled with a new ASDF version, I have to deal with bugs in ASDF that in one way or the other break my setup with logical pathnames.

Since my time is limited and is better served on things other than producing bug reports for ASDF (which is a tool that should be much more stable than it currently is), I decided now that it is better to drop logical pathnames and go for the Unix-like names that the ASDF maintainers seem to strongly prefer. RMCL would be the only Common Lisp implementation that would cause a problem in this regard.

So, what's the verdict?


Thanks a lot for any hints!

Best,
Pascal

--
Pascal Costanza
The views expressed in this email are my own, and not those of my employer.