[cells-devel] Re: Cells

[Kenneth Tilton]

I moved this to cells-devel to get more feedback. Paging all CVS 
afficionados:

On Nov 13, 2004, at 8:19 AM, Svein Ove Aas wrote:

> On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 23:06:10 -0500, Kenneth Tilton 
> <ktilton at nyc.rr.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Nov 12, 2004, at 9:23 PM, Svein Ove Aas wrote:
>>
>>
>>>
>>> I'm not stopping before I've gotten it to work, though - all of it -
>>> but that might require a fair bit of change.
>>>
>>> Would you object to me changing things around to use ASDF instead of
>>> explicit loads,
>>
>> Are you referring to places where a given group loads
>> <group>-config.lisp? I forget how I got into that.. Suggestions for
>> alternatives are welcome.
>>
> Simple enough; tell asdf the files that load them depend on them, and
> they'll get loaded automatically. Some adjustment may be needed.

Now I remember. I was trying to arrange things so one could set up the 
configuration files outside the CVS source tree and then tweak them as 
needed for one's particular environment, then do a CVS update (possibly 
getting new config files as new config options are added) without 
stomping on one's own customizations. So there has to be a "load" form 
executed which looks to the configuration globals to know what to load.

Maybe it is CVS i need to study.  Perhaps a CVS update would handle the 
situation I described gracefully -- ie, notify me that I need to 
manually merge?

>
>>> and a separate cello-config package instead of putting
>>> configuration variables in cl-user?
>>
>> Cello is just one library under the Cells umbrella. Are you looking at
>> all the source under cell-cultures? Actually, some of them are meant 
>> to
>> work independently of Cells. Anyway, what advantage to you see in your
>> proposal?
>>
>
> Call it cell-cultures-config, then; that's not important.
> The point is not to pollute the cl-user namespace; although it's a bit
> far-fetched, there's always a *chance* some user will end up
> overwriting one of the configuration variables. Also, I sometimes tend
> to clean up a session by deleting everything in cl-user, which
> wouldn't work either.
>
> I don't know how universal this opinion is, but personally I don't
> think *any* distributed software should touch cl-user.

I think I might be the oddball on this issue. I have seen a lot of code 
agonizing over namespace pollution. I will resolve this when I revise 
the config setup in light of folks' input on whether CVS will suffice 
to preserve local config setups.

kenny