[drakma-devel] Fwd: Portability of Drakma

[Erik Huelsmann]

Forwarding rejected message.

I wasn't subscribed yet. Sorry.

bye,

Erik.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Huelsmann <ehuels at gmail.com>
Date: Feb 25, 2007 2:38 PM
Subject: Re: Portability of Drakma
To: Edi Weitz <edi at agharta.de>
Cc: drakma-devel at common-lisp.net


On 2/24/07, Edi Weitz <edi at agharta.de> wrote:
> Hi Erik,
>
> I'm sending a copy of this to the mailing list where I think we should
> continue this discussion.

Ah. Sorry about that, I wasn't aware of this list.

> > 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.
>
> 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.

That's both great and bad news: It's great you're aware of the usocket
project, it's too bad you tried and failed.

> 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.

Absolutely. New code shouldn't be a step backward. With that
requirement, a chicken-and-egg problem is introduced though: to
develop well-tested code, it needs to be (widely) used.

But to address your findings: you probably used one of the very first
releases: With 0.3.0, binary streams are supported on all
implementations. Next to that, I just downloaded and used LW5.0 to
test a simple GET request: all seems to work well. Indeed have there
been win32 related fixes to many backends.

> 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.

Is there a list somewhere as a reference to what I'm getting into?

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

Yes. Not having a Mac, I won't be able to test OpenMCL myself, but
maybe others can assist there?

Thanks for your time.


bye,

Erik.