[mcclim-devel] Errors installing McClim

Oliver Uvman oliver.uvman at gmail.com
Mon Jul 12 06:36:46 UTC 2010


Hey again!

Just wanted to report in and say I got it working! Compared to the
many days I've spent trying to get various clbuild, asdf, clc and
other systems to do it for me, this was easy as pie. Is it ok if I go
in and edit the clwiki to reflect that this (and not asdf) is the
easiest way to install it? Right now the wiki is probably going to
lead many people like myself to think that asdf is the way to go,
while it doesn't seem to work at all.

/Oliver

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 13:21, Oliver Uvman <oliver.uvman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Big thanks for the replies! I'll set about cleaning up my SBCL install
> and then attempting to install McClim from CVS now, but please notify
> me if it's a better idea to install SBCL from CVS, too.
>
> Regards,
> Oliver Uvman
>
> On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 06:23, Andy Hefner <ahefner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 1:38 AM, Oliver Uvman <oliver.uvman at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hello!
>>>
>>> I'm trying to follow the guide on
>>> http://mcclim.cliki.net/McCLIM%2BSBCL for installing McClim, but when
>>> I do (asdf-install:install :mcclim) I get an error, which I tried to
>>> accept and continue the install from, but the errors just keep coming
>>> after that so I thought I'd ask.
>>
>> Short answer: Follow Stas's advice, and additionally check out the
>> latest version of McCLIM from CVS rather than using asdf-install.
>>
>> Longer answer:
>>
>> The advice on the wiki is a bit out of date.  These days, nine out of
>> ten lispers agree that neither asdf-install, common-lisp-controller,
>> nor Debian/Ubuntu-packaged lisp implementations should be used by
>> anyone, at any time, for any purpose. McCLIM itself should certainly
>> be checked out from CVS (or a git mirror) rather than using
>> asdf-install, because the last released version of McCLIM is quite
>> old. CLC, foisted upon unwitting victims by the Debian lisp packages,
>> may not be intrinsically broken, but few people use it, fewer
>> understand it, and it has earned a reputation for breaking things and
>> causing headaches while offering no real benefit to most users.
>>
>>> The error I'm getting is:
>> ...
>>>   for "file /usr/share/common-lisp/source/slime/swank-loader.lisp"
>>> ;
>>>   {BF565E1}>:
>>> ;     package "CLC" not found
>> ...
>>> I tried (asdf-install:install :clc) but there doesn't seem to be a
>>> package with that name. I know it stands for common-lisp-controller,
>>> and I have it apt-getted on my system (Ubuntu Lucid x86). Anybody know
>>> what the problem is?
>>
>> Some background: Swank is the backend half of SLIME, written in CL and
>> loaded into your lisp process, which emacs talks to over a socket. It
>> contains several functions which are useful to McCLIM for doing things
>> which can't be implemented portably, and as it's been ported to every
>> CL of interest and virtually everyone can be expected to already have
>> it on their machines, it makes a handy compatibility layer. CLC is a
>> strange thing which, as I understand it, is used by the Debian CL
>> packages for its ability to compile systems to FASLs and copy those to
>> /usr where any user will be able to load them, so that each user isn't
>> forced to compile everything themselves (and deal with the problem of
>> not having write permission to /usr where the source code is
>> installed). You can imagine how such an arrangement might not appeal
>> to someone who wants the option of easily hacking on any and all
>> components in their lisp environment, and as such most "upstream"
>> hackers, so to speak, reject the CLC-based environment and install
>> everything from source, rendering them unable to help when buggy
>> interactions involving CLC crop up. :)
>>
>> The version of SLIME provided by your Linux distribution appears to
>> have been modified with the expectation that CLC will always be loaded
>> before attempting to load Swank. This must hold true for however
>> they've arranged SLIME to work, but not for the (admittedly uncommon)
>> case of CL software that wants to load Swank independently. Loading
>> CLC manually before attempting to load McCLIM may well fix the issue,
>> but I don't know how to do that.
>>
>




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