[Ecls-list] [ANN] Common Lisp Document Repository

[Pascal Costanza]

CDR - The Common Lisp Document Repository

What?

The Common Lisp Document Repository is a repository of documents that  
are of interest to the Common Lisp community. The most important  
property of a CDR document is that it will never change: if you refer  
to it, you can be sure that your reference will always refer to  
exactly the same document.

Why?

There have been a number of attempts to establish a standardization  
process for Common Lisp after it has been officially published as an  
ANSI standard. The ANSI standardization was very costly and very time  
consuming (according to http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/ 
msg/15248a1b11c5a603 it took nearly 10 years and at least $400K).

The goal of the Common Lisp Document Repository is to be more light- 
weight and more efficient. We focus on one aspect of standardization:  
the ability to refer to a specification document in an unambiguous way.

The Common Lisp Document Repository intentionally does not define a  
process for coming up with specifications or any other means to  
guarantee some level of quality of the submitted documents. Instead,  
we aim for a community-driven, decentralized approach to come up,  
discuss and finalize specifications. In this sense, we only provide  
the services of librarians.

We hope that the Common Lisp Document Repository has the potential to  
prove useful in establishing new de-facto standards, and to serve as  
a stepping stone for more formal standardizations in the long run.

Where?

The Common Lisp Document Repository is hosted at http://cdr.eurolisp.org

How?

The Common Lisp Document Repository is a repository of printable text  
documents that contain material that are of interest to the Common  
Lisp community. For example, a CDR document can contain  
specifications of libraries, language extensions, example  
implementations, test suites, articles, etc. Each CDR document will  
be identified by a number. Form and possible contents of CDR  
documents are not prescribed, but the goal is to provide the Common  
Lisp community with a way to unambiguously refer to a document by way  
of mentioning its CDR number.

The repository already contains two CDR documents: CDR 0 describes  
CDR itself, and CDR 1 is the CLOS Metaobject Protocol specification  
as published in the book "The Art of the Metaobject" by Gregor  
Kiczales, Jim des Rivieres and Daniel G. Bobrow.

The presence of a document in the CDR repository does not imply a  
recommendation of any kind, but we leave the acceptance or rejection  
of particular documents to the community's natural selection process.  
We expect that some CDR documents will claim to be replacements of,  
or clarifications for, previous ones, but again such statements do  
not mean that this repository's goal is to enforce such developments.  
We are just librarians who want to make it possible to refer and cite  
documents of interest to Common Lispers.

We use a light-weight process that consists of the following steps:

   1. One or more authors submit a document.
   2. We check that the document is a printable text document, that  
it is indeed about Common Lisp, and that it does not contain  
objectionable material (like porn, religious or political statements,  
etc.).
   3. The document will be immediately assigned a fresh CDR number  
that can be used to refer to the document. We will make the document  
available for an initial period, after which it will be frozen and  
moved into final status, unless the authors decide to withdraw the  
document during the initial period.

For more details about the process, see the CDR manual at http:// 
cdr.eurolisp.org


The CDR editors
Marc Battyani, Pascal Costanza, Arthur Lemmens, Edi Weitz