Almost there

[Faré]

Dear lispers,

we're ready to bless ASDF 3.1.4.25 as release 3.1.5, and now is a good
time to test it before it's too late. Anton, do you have time and/or
resource for a run of cl-test-grid?

Nothing should have changed in the semantics of ASDF itself since the
last run of cl-test-grid, so I don't expect any discrepancy. We did
add better immutable-system support thanks to Dave Cooper, but that
isn't cover by cl-test-grid, only by our regression tests and his
usage.

What we did change was to make UIOP more robust and portable. Robert
Goldman and I, with the help of Dave Cooper, ran extensively tests. We
have notably debugged a lot of pathname and run-program issues on
Windows. These issues recently cropped up since we have added a lot of
tests since last release, and since neither of us is a Windows user,
they had previously only been run on Unix. We also made an important
compatibility fix for SBCL, added CLASP support, enhanced support for
new LispWorks 7, fixed chdir for ABCL and XCL.

As far as I'm concerned, this means that portable scripting in Common
Lisp is more a reality than ever. If you are careful, you can write
portable CL code that runs as is on Unix (including Linux and MacOS)
and Windows. As usual, the more portable you want to be, the more
careful you have to be; but at least UIOP covers all the bases with a
reasonable portable interface (please don't use anymore any of cl-fad,
trivial-shell, run-shell-command, trivial-backtrace; use uiop). I
recommend CCL for a portable scripting implementation, because SBCL on
Windows isn't quite as good (and is not able to call out to CMD.EXE)
and CLISP has too many quirks (and is looking for a new maintainer to
release it anew after 5 years). For examples of scripting in CL, see
https://github.com/fare/fare-scripts

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by
slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work does not eat, has been
replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat. — Leon Trotsky