[clbuild-devel] clbuild dependencies

[David Lichteblau]

Hi,

Quoting mosi (amosat+lisp at gmail.com):
> I would like to kindly ask the maintainers, for the sake of newbs like me,
> to have mercy and remove the cffi compatibility from the elephant, or
> at least not to symlink the cffi-uffi-compat.

thanks for letting us know.  I can understand your concern.  

Although I think it is worth pointing out that a quick search over the
list archives would have answered your question immediately, perhaps the
preference of cffi over uffi in clbuild is making things needlessy
complicated.

For a long time I have advocated use of cffi-uffi-compat, because when
clbuild started out, it was not so much a mere downloading tool for
every library in existence, but was targeted more at the integrated
testing of libraries that are currently relevant (or at least that was
my point of view and was how I understood Luke's goals in creating it).

And from that perspective, I didn't think that it was worth adding uffi,
considering that cffi has superseded it in virtually every respect,
namely both in terms of features and in popularity.  Its compatibility
with uffi is superb, meaning that any library that works with uffi and
not with cffi-uffi-compat didn't actually stick to the uffi API.

However, I realize that clbuild's current popularity is mostly due to
its downloading support.  (In fact, if compatibility with earlier
versions of clbuild wasn't important, I'd be tempted to advocate the
removal of non-essential features like "clbuild build", dumpcore, etc.)


So if anyone wants to write a patch that adds uffi to clbuild, removing
the use of cffi-uffi-compat, my stance would be that I'm probably not
going to be the one actively writing or merging that patch, but I
wouldn't oppose it if anyone else did.


d.