[climacs-devel] Should we move SWINE into Climacs?

[Timothy Moore]

Troels Henriksen wrote:
> As most of you probably know, CLIM-desktop ships with an extension to
> Climacs called SWINE. SWINE adds SWANK-based SLIME-like functionality
> to Climacs' Lisp Syntax-mode, and is thus pretty much necessary for
> doing Lisp development in Climacs. Thus, I believe that SWINE
> logically belongs in Climacs itself.
> 
> Of course, moving SWINE to Climacs will bring Swank in as a
> dependency, but this will probably not be a huge problem, due to
> Swanks ubiquity, and the fact that it should be possible to
> conditionally load Swine only if Swank is available.
> 
> What are your thoughts on this matter?

It's too bad that Swank is not really an asdf system in its own right. 
Sure, there's a swank.asd file in Slime, but it's not normally used, 
even if Slime is (perhaps implicitly) using asdf to load up its 
dependencies. Perhaps the Slime folks could be persuaded to package it 
up a bit; failing that I suppose you could create a system in Swank that 
  Does The Right Thing.

As far as conditional dependencies and options go, that seems to be a 
weakness in asdf, something that GNU configure does better for all its 
warts. I realize that's quite unfair given that asdf is a build system 
and not a configuration system, but I'm not sure how to construct 
options in the asdf world without a large collection of system 
definitions and ugly read-time conditionals. Perhaps more could be done 
with asdf:feature-dependent-op and arguments to load-op; it would be 
nice to type (for example) (oos 'load-op :climacs :with-clim :mcclim).

Tim