clisp support [Re: Pushed ASDF 3.1.7.8: fixes for CLISP, etc.]

[Robert Goldman]

On 9/1/16 Sep 1 -9:17 AM, Elias Pipping wrote:
> 
>> On 28 Aug 2016, at 02:28, Faré <fahree at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Sam Steingold (sds) probed me on some old bugs, which led me to waste
>> a day debugging issues on and with CLISP.
>>
>> First I reproduced CLISP bug 677, figured out what CLISP was doing
>> wrong (incorrect merging of logical pathnames in compile-file), and
>> implemented a workaround (physicalize everything I can, trust
>> compile-file's return value over my :output-file argument):
>> https://sourceforge.net/p/clisp/bugs/677/
>>
>> Then, I found a cleaner fix to the issue with DIRECTORY wanting "*"
>> rather than "*.*" as the match-all pattern on CLISP and GCL.
> 
> Dear Faré,
> 
> with 3.1.7.7, clisp-2.49 and clisp-git(*) passed test-logical-pathname.script for me.
> With 3.1.7.8, clisp-git continues to pass test-logical-pathname.script for me, but clisp-2.49 now fails.
> 
> As far as I can tell, that’s because previously part of the test was disabled for clisp and is now unconditionally enabled.
> 
> I just want to make sure that this was intentional and known. I don’t know if functionality probed in the relevant part of the tests is crucial in order for ASDF to function but this might mean that clisp 2.49 can no longer be supported. If so, I would drop it from the list of platforms I’m testing with.

Even worse, AFAICT clisp does not make its version number available to
the lisp context.

There's a SYSTEM::VERSION, but:

[2]> (system::version)
(20080430)

which doesn't say "2.49" to me :-(

I'm not sure what to do about this, since clisp seems to have lost the
ability to make releases.  I'm reluctant to start building clisp from
source -- on three different platforms yet -- just to test it.
Especially if this isn't relevant to what clisp users are actually getting.

If you're in touch with Sam, Faré, maybe you could encourage him to make
a release.

Indeed, I'm prepared to threaten to back out fixes that work on clisp
from source, and break release clisp.  Or at least re-disable the clisp
tests.

I don't think it should be the ASDF maintainer's job to track every lisp
implementation from source.