[slime-devel] Re: Slime packaging in Debian

[Luke Gorrie]

Robert Marlow <bobstopper at bobturf.org> writes:

> I just packaged up SLIME into .debs. I wanted to ask for opinions on how
> I've packaged them.

Great! Where/how do we check them out?

> I've packaged the slime *.el files and the swank *.lisp files into
> separate packages named slime-el and cl-swank respectively. My rationale
> is that some people such as myself may wish to install swank and slime
> on separate machines and use them over TCP. However separating them may
> make SLIME slightly more difficult to install for beginners. What do
> people here think?

I would prefer to keep them both together.

> Also, in the process of making the source friendly with debian's
> common-lisp-controller I had to make some changes.

sounds ominous :-)

> I edited swank.asd and put all the file components from
> swank-loader.lisp into it. swank-loader doesn't get used at all this
> way. The only other change I had to make to get this to work was
> using the system definition utility to start swank in slime.el
> instead of swank-loader. I haven't catered for ~/.swank yet but I'm
> sure it can easily go elsewhere.

These sound generally interesting, can you post patches to the list
please?

> I was wondering if my omission of swank-loader is likely to cause any
> complications and was also wondering what the rationale for including it
> was when system maintenance can be performed just by using something
> like ASDF or some other ubiquitous system definition utility.

I can't find our original rationale in the list archive right now but
I suspect it's that no system definition utility was ubiquitous at the
time (october 2003). Even today I'd think that calling ASDF:OOS during
startup would cause problems for quite a few people who don't have it
in their image at startup.

What do people think of these requirements for slime-in-debian?:

1. Exactly the same code. If things need to change then we should do
   it in SLIME CVS and not in debian-specific patches.

2. Doesn't require common-lisp-controller. You should be able to
   'apt-get install slime' and use it with a vanilla non-Debian Lisp.

3. We should fix some authentication on the socket connection to
   remove security considerations (if someone else connects to Lisp
   before Emacs; see top of PROBLEMS file)

Thoughts?