extending uiop/run-program

[Elias Pipping]

Dear Faré,

> On 31 Jul 2016, at 21:56, Faré <fahree at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> this kind of functionality is welcome in UIOP.

I’m happy to hear that.

> However, the
> responsibility is yours to ensure that it will work on every
> implementation on every platform.

For Linux and if necessary also other unix-like systems (macOS, FreeBSD) I think
I can do that myself without access to build bots. For anything else (that leaves
mostly windows I guess), I’d need help since I have zero knowledge of command
line access and automation on that platform.

> Please make reasonably sure it works
> before you submit the patch. You may contact various vendors for a
> test license as appropriate.

I’ve installed cl-launch (I’m no longer quite sure how I managed to live without it);
so far I’ve got allegro cl, clozure cl, cmu cl, ecl, and sbcl working. I’ll have to look
into clisp and mkcl a bit to get them to work properly (no asdf / old asdf). I’ve also
contacted LispWorks.

> Note that there are several run-program style libraries around. If
> you're going to do this, I suggest you look at each and every of these
> libraries (notably executor and external-program) and make sure you
> have at least feature-parity and implementation-parity with them. Also
> make sure that you explicitly raise an error on unsupported
> implementations, at the start of every function that doesn't support
> them.

Thanks for the pointer, I had not heard of executor (I’m familiar with the
source code of external-program, though).

> Also, if you are going to support these interface, you can graduate
> them out of % namespace (but keep the % name around for backward
> compatibility for a year or two).

Understood.

> Would you be interested in becoming official maintainer for UIOP?

Yes, I would. I’m confident that I’d be able to respond to issues in a timely
fashion and I’m willing to learn what I think I’d need to learn.


Elias