[slime-devel] Re: Towards 1.0?

[Luke Gorrie]

Helmut Eller <e9626484 at stud3.tuwien.ac.at> writes:

> Which versions of the various Lisp to we want to support?  The latest
> released version in June?

That would be nice, but I think we should keep the backwards
compatibility that we have if people are need it. We're testing with
ACL5.0 so we should stay compatible with that if possible, and I think
people are using older LispWorksen out of necessity (please confirm!).

Raymond Toy also suggested we shouldn't be too quick to drop CMU18e
support, since 19a will want some field testing before it's considered
"the right stuff". But 19a won't be out by end of June anyway, but
probably will by August. I would love to delete the 18e-compat code
but I think we should wait until (immediately) after 1.0.

For SBCL, OpenMCL, CLISP I don't know of any reason to aim for
compatibility with older versions.

We should also try to make sure that we'll be forwards-compatible for
a while by minimizing our uses of internal functions and hassling
implementors not to delete the ones that we still use too quickly :-)

The SBCL backend definitely needs an audit since those guys are so
good about making supported interfaces for us.

> Tests for the "essential" features we be nice.  It would also be nice
> if we could write tests for a specific Lisp.

Yes. In addition to the fully automated tests it might be good to
write an interactive tester that sets up certain situations (file with
compiler notes, sldb, etc) and asks you to check certain things
manually. I'm not sure. It was helpful in Distel, but then I didn't have
any fully-automated tests there.

> Are there any features we can remove?  I was going to suggest removing
> the REPL (because the code is messy and a REPL is not the Emacs way to
> interact with anything), but I guess people wouldn't like that :-)

Amazingly I find myself using the REPL all the time, even though I
never use IELM for Emacs Lisp. I'm not sure why.

> Any outstanding keybinding wars?  A while ago we talked about grouping
> documentation commands under C-c C-d; I like that idea.

Agree. We should also move hyperspec-lookup so that `C-c C-h' does the
default action of listing all bindings starting with C-c, and move the
funky-indentation C-M-q command because it's different to the standard
indentation command on that binding (does a whole defun, not sexp at
point).

> Should we make a (final?) try to simplify the connection handling code
> in swank.lisp?  It is not very readable, but I haven't any good ideas
> to improve it.

Lots of code-cleanups would be good.

I'm still tempted to delete all of the multiple-connections code. It
seems to me like the only thing we use
multiple-connections-to-one-lisp for is attaching a new connection to
a thread, but that seems multiplexable in principle at least. I'll
reread what we said about this last time.

-Luke