[slime-devel] Re: Slime license annoyances

[GP lisper]

On 24 Oct 2005 01:54:13 +0200, <luke at synap.se> wrote:
>
> - Getting SLIME into debian proper.
> - Preventing Debian & non-Debian SLIME from having different features.
> - Making cross-referencing work out-of-the-box for CLISP users.
>
> I rank them in the order listed and agree with Peter's suggestion that
> we stop bundling xref.lisp and just leave hooks for it instead. I
> don't like removing useful features but I'd like to see a full SLIME
> in Debian for easy access by newbies.
>
> Major objections?

Is there any indication that something 'bad' is happening?  As near as
I can tell, anyone interested in common lisp hears about slime pretty
quick.  The general suggestion is to run out of CVS in fact.  Unless
debian is tracking CVS closely, what slime a distro has is immaterial.
Anyone serious quickly dumps a distro'ed slime rather fast (for
instance, I had a cron cvs fetch running the second day of slime
usage).  Just a note, if you think that debian offers the best support
of common lisp, Gentoo passed it some time ago in terms of offered
packages.

Frankly, this looks like the old debian strongarm, you may recall the
'interesting conversations' that occurred at the birth of debian.
Since the majority of lisp users I saw with computers at ILC were
running either windows (i.e. probably clisp) or macs [only one linux
user encountered], and the typical post in c.l.l mentions clisp more
often than not, I suspect the downside here is deeper than imagined.
Perhaps floating this idea on the clisp mailing lists might be
something to consider.


>P.S. Witness the invincible arm of Debian sending programs with
>     awkward licenses hurtling into limbo! *WHOOSH*!

And what does it leave in their place?
How many linux real-time plotter programs exist?


-- 
If you don't like LOOP, how do you feel about DOLIST ?