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

[Thomas F. Burdick]

Kenny Tilton writes:
 > 
 > 
 > 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?

Bah, I was so pleased with the silly phrasing of my mail that I didn't
bother to make sure it was comprehensible.  I meant, if I take the cvs
version of cell-cultures/cells and package it up as cells-2.0, do you
have any objections?  I wasn't expecting any, buy maybe you had some
fix for something that was half-finished.

 > Raised above (if I understood you). But I am all in favor of fixing 
 > asdf-install to point to cells2.

That's exactly what I was attemptiong to communicate :-)

 > 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?

What I'm trying to do is get LTK to depend on Cells.  I hadn't thought
of using echos for the communication mechanism -- sounds slick.  Maybe
I should have just looked at the code.  Talking to Peter, it sounds
like the LTK mechanism has improved since Celtic's genesis, so that
makes sense.

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

(Huh, I thought you were considering using it for ed software).  Okay,
I'll go ahead with my plans to marry Cells and Ltk, then raid Celtic
for good widgets with no qualms or worries.

 > 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

Ha ha, that's great!  FWIW, I liked using noweb with static languages,
and with Cells I think it'd be pretty easy to reimplement a subset of
it dynamically in Lisp, so you can C-M-x forms like:

  (defun some-function (x y z)
    <<hairy processing>>
    (values x (foo y z)))

And somewhere else:

  ... text explaining to the FDA why this works correctly ...

  <<hairy processing>>=
    ...
  @

Actually, I once got partway through such a beast for Hemlock using
KR, before realizing I had no real need for it that justified
finishing it.  If I were you, I'd do something like that, so you could
make a for-the-FDA-auditor chapter.  And if you use noweb syntax, you
only need to build the tangle step, you can just reuse the existing
noweave.