[clbuild-devel] clbuild 2.0 in git with Quicklisp integration

[David Lichteblau]

Hello list,

it has been silent around clbuild for some time now, both on the list
and in the repository.

Part of that may be because clbuild simply works for its users :-), but
I imagine other reasons to have been:

  - lack of ASDF2 support, meaning that the inclusion of ASDF2 support
    in SBCL has made it hard to work with clbuild meaningfully

  - the appearance of Quicklisp, arguably one of the most important
    projects out there right now for the free lisp software community

  - last not least the areas in which clbuild has never been
    particularly strong, and which Quicklisp covers better, i.e. mainly
    the quick downloading of large numbers of projects, as is needed for
    the initial download or update of projects with many dependencies.

I am happy to announce the release of a new version of clbuild designed
to address these shortcomings.

Some of you will already heard about this new version on IRC.  It was
called qlbuild while it was only an idea, and retained the name qlbuild
while I started hacking on that idea.

I have now decided to ditch the qlbuild name, and rename it back to
clbuild, version 2.0.

clbuild 2.0 features the following:

  - support for ASDF2 (and only ASDF2)

  - integration with QuickLisp

  - concentration on clbuild's core competencies (i.e., easy Lisp and
    slime startup, download of projects from version control, SBCL
    building) while dropping features that other projects do better
    (dependency tracking, tarball downloading).  The latter are all done
    through Quicklisp now.

  - some overall refactoring.  The large shell script was split into
    multiple files.

The new project is maintained in git, not darcs, and can be found at:

  http://gitorious.org/clbuild2
  git clone git://gitorious.org/clbuild2/clbuild2.git

(Note the version number in the URL -- I would like to drop that number
from the gitorious project name if possible, but there is an unrelated
git fork of clbuild on gitorious, which is named just clbuild, and is
based more directly on the old darcs version, I believe.)

Please note that the refactoring effort has meant that some features got
dropped, simply because I started from scratch with a minimal script,
and added features back only bit by bit.  If any feature important to
you is missing, let's discuss its inclusion.  Some changes are
intentional though.  Please see the file DESIGN-NOTES in the repository
for a brief overview.

Finally, please note that I haven't updated the clbuild web page on
common-lisp.net yet.  Unless there is a huge outcry over my changes, I
am planning on rewriting that page to discuss clbuild2 instead of
classic clbuild though.


d.