[slime-devel] Re: Slime packaging in Debian

[Robert Marlow]

On Sun, 2005-02-20 at 10:36 +0100, Luke Gorrie wrote:
> 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?

Currently at http://www.bobturf.org/software/slime/
I'm working with KMR to get it into Debian.


> > 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.

So chuck them back together then? Or should we ask for other users'
opinions?


> > 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?

Attached


> > 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?

I'm all for 1. One of the reasons I wanted to approach the list was to
see if perhaps we could find a way to make both solutions work depending
on the environment under which SLIME is being installed.

I find Common-lisp-controller makes it very conveniant to install and
uninstall lisp packages under Debian. It solves many of the problems
surrounding different implementations and different architectures all
using the same source directory over NFS that I understand swank-loader
is intended to solve and, more importantly, it does it in a way that's
consistent with the rest of Debian's lisp packages. I'm by no means
pushing the idea of doing away with swank-loader, but perhaps if we
could arrange for ASDF to be used by default, and if it doesn't exist,
fall back on swank-loader? Probably something simple like #+asdf
(asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op :swank) #-asdf (load "swank-loader.lisp") is all
that's needed.

Calling swank.asd seems to imply asdf is installed so it's probably ok
if it doesn't load swank-loader at all.

Good point on 3. The Debian security team may complain about that :) I
think this could be fixed by generating something random with M-x SLIME
and using it as a key for create-server. I can whack that together and
submit a patch if that's all that's required.


-- 
Robert Marlow <bobstopper at bobturf.org>
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