[Ecls-list] ECL on Mac OS X, general new-to-ECL issues

[Thomas F. Burdick]

lisp writes:
 > Hi Thomas,
 > 
 > thanks for your interest on ECL. I will proceed to answer some of your
 > questions and comments.
 > 
 > First of all, the MacOSX port has been done by me using only the account
 > that was available at sourceforge. This was back on OSX 10.1. The servers
 > running 10.2 are now almost unreachable and 10.3 is nowhere to be used.
 > Considering that I do not have a Mac around and that all development was
 > done with a slow terminal account, I think the port is not in such a bad
 > shape :-)

Okay, that makes sense.  What systems do you and ECL's major users
normally use?  It might be nice to have a note on the web page saying
something like "ECL is regularly tested on Linux/x86 and MS Windows
(or whatever).  It has also been ported to Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD,
Solaris, Windows/Cygwin and OSX, running on top of the Intel, Sparc,
Alpha and PowerPC processors."  Or even a little grid like the one on
www.sbcl.org.  It's perfectly understandable that an open-source
system is only regularly tested on machines that the developer(s) have
-- but it would be nice to know what those machines are :-)

Just to be clear, because tone doesn't always communicate well over
e-mail, I'm not complaining about these issues, just trying to orient
myself in ECL, and to point out the rough edges I encountered as a new
user.  I understand that ECL has been mostly a one-man effort, and I
appreciate that you've kept alive the system I read about in the
EcoLisp paper ages ago.

I still don't have a net connection at home, so I'll try to send a
Darwin patch when I remember.  BTW, I had some trouble building on
Solaris, too; if anyone reading the list has something jumpt to mind,
let me know, otherwise I'll try to figure it out or at least send a
useful bug report :-)

Hey, I like the pace that the SLIME work is progressing at, at this
rate the SLIME interface will be there by the time I actually get a
chance to seriously investigate ECL!

 > If you need further help I provide on-site support in Munich at a moderate
 > price: a muffin and a latte machiatto :-)

Heh, understood.  I think I'll try to take you up on that support
offer, maybe next week or after easter.