[drakma-devel] Re: Portability of Drakma

[Edi Weitz]

Hi Erik,

I'm sending a copy of this to the mailing list where I think we should
continue this discussion.

On Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:35:10 +0100, "Erik Huelsmann" <ehuels at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've been working on a very portable library for sockets code. This
> library is now more portable than trivial-sockets and supports more
> functionality on all of its supported lisp implementations.
>
> If you want to support the same platforms (and all the ones I'll be
> adding), you could switch from the -unmaintained- trivial-sockets to
> usocket (http://common-lisp.net/project/usocket/).
>
> I'm merely sending this mail to point out the existence of the
> library, in case you didn't know. Thanks for your time, attention
> and continued support for Common Lisp libraries.

I'm aware of usockets' existence because Andreas Fuchs pointed it out
to me shortly after I had released the portable version of Drakma
(using trivial-sockets).  At that point I tried to switch to usocket
and immediately ran into problems - IIRC it didn't even load on
LispWorks on Windows (although ISTR the website claimed that LispWorks
was a supported implementation), and it couldn't provide binary socket
streams for all supported implementations.  So, I dismissed it for the
time being.

It might well be the case that both of these issues have been fixed
since, but I currently don't have the time to test again.  I generally
think it's better to rely on a maintained and documented library than
on obscure and old code, but of course the new code should work at
least as good as the old one.

I'd be happy to accept patches to switch Drakma from trivial-sockets
to usocket, but the following criteria should be met:

  - The LispWorks code should remain untouched (i.e. not use usocket).

  - The code should have been tested successfully on at least the
    Lisp/OS combinations that are currently supported by Drakma.

The actual patch itself should be a piece of cake, but I guess the
testing will take some time.

Thanks,
Edi.