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

[Faré]

(Misclicked and the message was sent before it was finished. Grrr.)

On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 09:02, Pascal Costanza <pc at p-cos.net> wrote:
> 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?
>
As usual, I will accept patches. I will not be able to test RMCL anymore.


> 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.
>
The problems were fixed as soon as a suitable bug report was provided
(i.e. not by you).

James Anderson and I have gone through a lot of trouble to make sure
that logical pathnames were well supported by ASDF. There again, there
have been bugs that have been fixed as soon as reported.

> 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
>
No one is going to support you magically when you don't report bugs.

> 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.
>
Ever since 2.016.2 last June, ASDF has supported Unix-style pathnames
in RMCL for its configuration files. No problem to be caused.

> So, what's the verdict?
>
You can keep MCL running in a PowerPC emulator in a OS X 10.6 virtual
machine under some hypervisor; we won't, but we'll be glad to support
you whenever you report bugs.

Actually, maybe you can help us properly support RMCL with respect to encodings.
Does MCL have external formats? What are acceptable external format arguments?

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org