[slime-devel] Re: Slime 1.2.1

[Thomas F. Burdick]

On 4/12/06, Nikodemus Siivola <nikodemus at random-state.net> wrote:
> Your man behind the curtain:
>
>  "SBCL developers aren't nice, and #lisp isn't too helpfull."
>
> While I can agree with your sentiments I don't see the relevance here:
> there is a demonstrated need for tarballs (people behind company
> firewalls can't always get at CVS), and unless you want to claim 1.2.1
> as being up to date new ones are needed. Whether they are releases or
> automagic CVS snapshots is a different, but equally unrelated to SBCL
> and #lisp, issue.

Actually, he was also claiming that you need bleeding-edge SLIME for
the latest SBCL, which hasn't been the case for a while.

Really, just some release from within the last 10 months would solve
the problem.  Back when SLIME and SBCL were both in rapid motion, you
needed a careful match of the two.  However, I last updated one of my
SLIMEs when I switched to the 0.9.x series of SBCL some 9 or 10 months
ago, and that SLIME works fine with SBCL >= 0.9.0, recent CMUCL's, and
Allegro 7 and 8.

The moral of this is that SLIME has been stable in terms of what it
demands from a Lisp for quite a long time.  As far as I'm concerned it
was feature-complete when it grew proper Unicode support.  In case
anyone is wondering why I haven't contributed to SLIME in the last
year or so, it's because nothing major has been broken, and I haven't
had any itches I wanted Emacs to scratch.  When it hasn't done
everything I needed it to, I've submitted patches to that effect --
which explains what I'm doing here, expressing support for what seems
self-evidently a good thing: Mario Mommer sees a need for some regular
releases or snapshots, and is willing to do the work to make it
happen.  One might wonder what this "G P" fellow is doing here, aside
from trolling about SBCL, filling up everyone's mailboxes, and being a
general pain in the ass.