[slime-devel] How to start Slime/Swank?

[Ian Phillips]

Hi, stupid newbie question here: I'm having problems starting swank (and, by 
implication, Slime as well).

When I start emacs and do an "M-x slime" I get this error:

; compiling file 
"/usr/share/common-lisp/source/swank/swank-source-path-parser.lisp" (written 09 
MAY 2004 09:42:59 PM):
   debugger invoked on a SB-KERNEL:SIMPLE-PACKAGE-ERROR in thread 26812:
   The name :SWANK-BACKEND does not designate any package.
   You can type HELP for debugger help, or (SB-EXT:QUIT) to exit from SBCL.

I'm running emacs 21.3.50, and slime HEAD from CVS earlier today. I'm trying to 
use SBCL 0.8.10 as the backend.

Looking into it a little further, I see that if I just run sbcl from a shell and 
the do (require 'swank) or (asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :swank) then I get the 
same result.

I thought at first that thjis was telling me that I needed to specify SBCL as a 
backend somewhere. I'm not too sure now though, I think that what is actually 
happening is that the swank files (in /usr/share/common-lisp/sources/swank) are 
getting loaded in the wrong order and that something is doing an (in-package 
:swank-backend) before the defpackage call has been loaded and run.

So, am I right? And if so, how can I make sure that the files are loaded in the 
correct sequence?

Another thought is: maybe there's a way to precompile all of this stuff (into a 
FASL file I think) and then it should "just work" ?

Any help would be gratly appreciated at this point.

Cheers,
Ian.

-- 
#ifndef  __COMMON_SENSE__ | Ian Phillips
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