[slime-devel] SLIME and OpenMCL 0.14.1: debugger question

[Helmut Eller]

Constantine Vetoshev <gepardcv at yahoo.com> writes:

> Greetings all,
> 
> I'm giving SLIME a spin, and I fetched a FAIRLY-STABLE version
> from CVS yesterday. M-x slime worked fine, and I had a REPL
> buffer. Unfortunately, whenever I drop into the OpenMCL debugger
> and choose a restart (like ABORT or ABORT-BREAK), all further
> attempts to interact with the REPL result in a "Lisp is not ready
> for requests from the REPL" message, and I have to restart
> SLIME. ABORT-BREAK actually gave me a CL-USER prompt, but with
> the same error message.
> 
> Do I simply misunderstand what's going on?

The intended behavior is that errors pop up a debugger buffer (the
sldb buffer) and you should then be able to select a restart in that
buffer with the keys 0-9 or by hitting Return on the restart[*].  

In FAIRLY-STABLE and older versions it is/was not possible to enter
input requests in the REPL when SLIME was in the "debugging state".
The current state should be indicated in the modeline.  However, C-c
C-: and most other commands can also be used in the debugging state.
And of course, the REPL is supposed to work again if you return from
the debugger.

This restriction has been removed in newer versions and it is now
possible to send requests from the REPL even if the debugger is
active. 

> Is this an OpenMCL issue? Some kind of threading issue?

I'm not sure.  I only have access to OpenMCL-0.12 on a very oldish
Linux and don't see the problems you describe.  We didn't do much with
threads in FAIRLY-STABLE, so unless you use threads in your code it is
probably not a threading issue.

If you don't get the sldb buffer, it is probably some bug in SLIME's
OpenMCL backend.  Marco or Alan know probably more about OpenMCL issues.

Some people reported output buffering problems with SLIME/OpenMCL and
perhaps you see something similar.  I think this is fixed in the
newest SLIME (but it could be done more elegantly with OpenMCL's
autoflush feature as Gary Byers suggested).

It would be nice if you could try the latest CVS version.

Helmut.


[*] A few bits of documentation are here: http://www.cliki.net/SLIME%20Features