[Asdf-devel] Wanted: Debian packager

[Faré]

On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 10:53 PM, Robert P. Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info> wrote:
> For previous versions of ASDF, Faré has been providing a debian package,
> cl-asdf.
>
> I'd like a volunteer to take over the packaging process.
>
> The more I mess with this, the less I feel like I know what I'm doing.
> I haven't *maintained* (as opposed to used) a Linux box for about 5
> years, and when I did, I used an RPM-based distro, instead of a
> .deb-based one.  For that matter, this is not dogfood that I plan on
> consuming.
>
> So.....
>
> 1.  Is anyone else willing to take over the packaging?  This should be
> relatively minimal amount of work, really just running the build
> scripts, uploading the packages, and yelling at me when the Changelog is
> badly formatted, etc.
>
I'm Cc'ing the debian common lisp team. Maybe someone there can take over.

> 2.  If the answer to #1 is "no," how bad is that, anyway?  Does anyone
> actually use ASDF from cl-asdf instead of getting it bundled from their
> implementation or installing from source?  Maybe this package could
> simply go away?
>
cl-asdf used to be very important back in the bad old days of ASDF 1,
when implementations didn't provide it (except sbcl, mostly), and
configuration was its own hell that common-lisp-controller was trying
to solve.

These days, most implementations (at least all those in debian?)
provide ASDF, and thanks to ASDF 2, c-l-c doesn't have to anything to
do anymore. It used to try to manage a system cache of fasls, but that
was disabled after it was found to be a big security risk. The only
correct way to do it would be with a daemon, that compiles from clean
debian-managed systems using debian-managed implementations only, in a
new process with a clean environment, etc. Since no one is interested
in actually writing that, I would just retire c-l-c instead. cl-asdf
itself is marginally useful, for cases when you need a more recent
asdf than the implementation provides, but it's not as big a deal as
it used to be.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
He wa'n't no common dog, he wa'n't no mongrel; he was a composite.
A composite dog is a dog that is made up of all the valuable qualities
that's in the dog breed — kind of a syndicate; and a mongrel is made up
of all riffraff that's left over.  — Mark Twain