[cl-debian] Anyone willing to package Cedilla?

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

> I did a basic package (you can get the darcs archive at
> http://cl-debian.alioth.debian.org/repository/pvaneynd/cl-cedilla/)

Thanks a lot.

I've just had a quick look at your package.  It's after 2am over here,
my apologies if the following fails to make sense.

I have one serious objection.  Cedilla is an end-user application, not
a Common Lisp library, so I believe the package should be called
``cedilla'', not ``cl-cedilla''.  The end user has no interest in the
programming language Cedilla is implemented in.

This is actually rather important to me: putting the programming
language in the name feels provincial.  It's also confusing to have to
apt-get cl-cedilla when what you want is an application called
Cedilla.  (Never mind consistency with SuSE.)

A more technical issue: when I installed your package, I couldn't run
cedilla: CLC told me I didn't have the right permissions (EACCESS,
with no further details).  I had to run Cedilla as root once in order
to get it to work.  (I might have mis-built it; I used dpkg-buildpackage
with no options except to change the signer, then dpkg -i.)

You may want to tighten the dependency to Clisp version 2.27 or later.
2.26 has nasty bug that breaks Cedilla, and older versions do not
support the ``-ansi'' flag.

In the description, I would suggest replacing ``unicode text'' with
``unicode plain text''.  There's also an unbalanced bracket after
``glyphs''.  I would also suggest mentioning a2ps in the description,
so that ``apt-cache search a2ps'' yields Cedilla.

I don't have a clear opinion on this subject, but you may want to
think about whether to include a Cedilla-typeset version of the README
file in the package.
  
> with a asdf file and a replacement cedilla 'executable' that calls
> (clc:clc-require :cedilla) and then invokes cedilla as normal. This
> causes a slight delay in startup.

On my machine (2.6GHz P4), that's a delay of 0.4s with a warm cache.
For comparison, the basic script that I use upstream causes a delay of
0.2s.

The trouble with this is that this delay is long enough to be
annoying, and we definitely don't want to be confirming the ``Lisp is
slow'' folklore.  Do you think that it might be worth to switch to
using a simple script, like the one upstream?  Can such a script be
automatically generated from the ASD definition?

More generally, shouldn't the CL-Debian project start thinking about
deployment of applications?  It seems completely oriented to libraries
right now.

> For further integration with debian I've taken a look at defoma and at
> the cedilla-config.lisp file and I fear I've run into the limit of my
> font knowledge.

Heh.

> Defoma expects me to write a perl library that can then use
> Defoma::Common to extract 'hints' from the font information I receive.
> The problem is that I see little relation between the information in
> these hints and the cedilla-config.lisp entries.

The cedila-config file was lovingly hand-crafted by the author ;-)

OTOH, now you mention Defoma, it should be possible to augment the
list of fontsets in cedilla-config with stuff produced by Defoma.  But
that will require some more support from Cedilla itself, so don't
bother right now.  I'll think about it, and let you know what I come
up with.

Thanks again,

                                        Juliusz