[Ecls-list] ECL support for cl-launch and xcvb

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Faré <fahree at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'll see if that bug is still there if/when I'm past the other bug.
> Interestingly, the si:getenv function worked at the command-line; it
> just failed badly when compiled into compute-arguments.

Is there a systematic way for me to reproduce the problem? Some test
in cl-launch perhaps?

> Yes, I understand all that, and I think you're doing a great job. I am
> a bit frustrated perhaps that I am handling bits that seem to not have
> tests in your regression suite. Hopefully, once made stable, my
> programs themselves could be included in such suite, and/or I could
> automatically update and test ecl with my programs, and things will go
> smoothly from there.

If you want, I could integrate cl-launch in the list of libraries and
programs that are automatically tested. I placed an announcement some
time ago about this project
http://ecls.sourceforge.net/logs_lib.html

Since then two things have happened. First, I received zero feedback,
except for the projects that most actively support ECL, Sage,
OpenAxiom, Fricas and Maxima. The first one is providing several of
the test platforms, and the last ones have helped with either the
porting or help and rely on this initiative.

The other thing is that I have come to realize is that there is no
systematic way of testing libraries. ASDF does not provide support for
this. I have posted a call for help, or better for consensus the
Common Lisp community, but so far the best I got was either being
ignored or recriminated for being too emphatic about this.

I find that currently there is no excuse for ASDF not to include a
TEST operation that returns useful information so that _all_ libraries
use it. Being challenged, I contributed a patch to ASDF that adds two
things: 1) a logging facility to better discover which components fail
and 2) a new operator TEST-OP that returns a value, whether the tests
succeed or not, with at least one example binding to the RT library
that collects the failures. Again, zero feedback about that.

Anyway, that was the usual rant that I feel the need to make from time
to time :-). I will persist in the effort of building as many
libraries as I can against current versions of ECL. All I need is
1) A repository for downloading periodically
2) either the library to use ASDF or provide a simple procedure
(simple means one lisp statement) to build,
3) equally simple form to run tests and return an OK or FAILURE value.
To add cl-launch, that is all I need and I would strongly encourage
you to help me on this.

Juanjo

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28006 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com