[cells-devel] Release engineering, and relationship with LTK

[Kenny Tilton]

Thomas F. Burdick wrote:

>It's been a pretty long time since the last Cells release, and in
>particular, what asdf-install gets you is the old Cells-I codebase.
>So, Kenny, do you have any problems with labeling the current cvs as
>Cells 2.0?
>
"labelling the current CVS"? whassat? Do you mean making c2 explicit, 
and keeping c1 around?

cell-cultures arose not to preserve c1, but just to handle absorbing all 
my open source work. I now regret that decision, and if I had any time 
for this would have two modules under Cells: Cells, Utils-kt. Hello-c 
might be a third, but I would move that to its own project if it takes 
hold, so may as well just leave it where it is.

remaining residents of cell-cultures could stay until they became 
active, and then would be invited to move out ala Cells-gtk. at any 
rate, in answer to your query, no, let's overwrite cells with cells-2. 
The easiest way is to just point the asdf-install at 
cell-cultures/cells, but I have no problem with the reorg described above.

>So, if anyone has any objections to a Cells-2.0 release sometime in
>the next few weeks, raise them now.
>
Raised above (if I understood you). But I am all in favor of fixing 
asdf-install to point to cells2.

>
>This brings me to my next point: whence Celtic, and whither?  At my
>new job, I can talk to Peter Hearth without getting up from my seat,
>so I've started using LTK a bit, and we'll probably be standardizing
>on it at work.  His motivation with LTK was not just to produce what
>exists now, but to use it as a base for a good, capable library of
>sophisticated widgets built in Lisp.  For that layer, he's receptive,
>at least in principle, to a Cells dependancy, especially if it makes
>things easier.  I'm far form having convinced him of that, but he's
>interested in seeing something I do using Cells and LTK.  This
>coincides quite nicely with my extreme desire to *use* Cells whenever
>I touch LTK.  I write code in a fairly functional style, and for
>stateful GUIs, you almost can't do that without a constraints system.
>At least, I have a hard time doing so -- hell, I've already hacked up
>1/4 of a Cells/KR competitor just in the process of trying to write a
>GUI app.
>
>The only thing that I've seen that stands in the way of Just Using
>Cells with LTK is that LTK creates the TK objects too eagerly: in TK,
>objects have a certain "path" (parent/child relationship), and this is
>being set before Cells would have a chance to initialize the dataflow
>system, which in turn would determine *where* some objects should go
>in the parent/child path.  LTK used to work differently here, in a way
>that would be Cells-compatible, and Peter has agreed to change this
>(or to accept a patch from me changing it ;).  So, whence Celtic, why
>the fork from LTK?
>
I am pretty sure the two were incompatible. I certainly got no value 
from LTk's higher-level mechanism for exchanging info with Tk, since the 
output (ne echo) mechanism handled that automatically (given suitable 
macrology). Only some low-level stuff from LTk survives in Celtic. Then 
I dashed ahead and did a ton more widgets than LTk had at the time, or I 
should say with all Tk attributes available to the Celtic user, while 
Peter was pulling them in one by one.

It sounds as if you want to work out a marriage of Cells with LTk, which 
is really a different project. Go for it. I would consider erasing 
Celtic, but it /was/ Vasilis's inspiration for Cells-gtk, so I think it 
should be spared the glue factory. Maybe call your project Cells-Ltk, or 
just add some code to LTk which will happen to require Cells and 
Utils-kt? Could that be done with a separate ASDF module underneath LTk?

fwiw, I certainly plan no further work on Celtic (which was never 
commercial, just a way to pump Cells).

kt

ps. hey, guess what? looks like we will be attempting some form of 
literate programming to handle vicious FDA requirements for system 
documentation in a sensible way. kt

-- 
Cells? Cello? Cells-Gtk?: http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cells/
Why Lisp? http://lisp.tech.coop/RtL%20Highlight%20Film

"Doctor, I wrestled with reality for forty years, and I am happy to state that I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd