[Bese-devel] Re: Getting ucw_box to work

[Lou Vanek]

Pupeno wrote:

> On Sun, 2006-06-18 at 14:04 +0000, Lou Vanek wrote:
> 
>>For some reason sbcl cannot figure out what the file-write-date of
>>"/home/pupeno/.slime/fasl/sbcl-0.9.13-linux-x86/swank-backend.fasl"
>>is,
>>so it is returning nil and operator '>' is complaining about a nil
>>argument.
> 
> I cleaned up .slime and other fasl containing directories, now the error
> is 
> 
> The file
> "/var/cache/common-lisp-controller/1000/sbcl/local/home/pupeno/Software/hosting-compass/ucw-boxset/slime/slime/swank-backend.lisp" does not exist.
> 
> The fasl of that file is there, but not the lisp one. I was recommended
> (by segv) to remove the swank-start form and load on Slime, but that
> takes me to the first error:
> 
> The name "IT.BESE.UCW-USER" does not designate any package.
>    [Condition of type SB-KERNEL:SIMPLE-PACKAGE-ERROR]
> 
> 
>>Interestingly enough, this is a known problem (to Google):
>>http://www.codecomments.com/archive274-2006-4-884549.html 
> 
> 
> Well, the fix didn't work for me :(
> 
> Is there any particular version of sbcl know to work ? should I move to
> cmucl ?
> 
> Thanks.

Here's a temp work-around that may be worth trying once. Instead of this:

(defun file-newer-p (new-file old-file)
   "Returns true if NEW-FILE is newer than OLD-FILE."
   (> (file-write-date new-file) (file-write-date old-file)))

you could use this:

(defun file-newer-p (new-file old-file)
   t)

This should cause asdf to recompile everything every time,
which shouldn't hurt much except to cause startup times to
be longer.

If you want to continue using sbcl I would take this discussion to both
the steel-bank.devel ML and the cclan (asdf) ML and get their opinions,
since they should have seen this problem before.

I'm no lisp expert and cannot recommend any particular version of lisp,
but doing anything is probably going to get you further than doing
nothing. In other words, yes, trying other Lisps is something I would
do. I tried sbcl once in the past and gave up on it since it didn't
seem to work on my platform (windows). You might also want to
ask segv which version of lisp he uses since i believe segv wrote both
ucw and slime.

Lou Vanek