[slime-devel] Can't load sbcl...

[Carlos Konstanski]

On 05/23/2010 02:08 PM, Liam Healy wrote:
> On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 2:00 PM, Kalyanov Dmitry
> <kalyanov.dmitry at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sunday 23 May 2010 19:19:05, Olwe Melwasul wrote:
>>> First post here. I'm a newbie to all things lisp. Hopefully this is the
>>> place to ask...
>>>
>>
>> It's probably better to ask on sbcl-help list.
>>
>>> Alas, the limbo between hand-installed and apt-get wizardry therein I am no
>>> doubt lost. Actually, my Emacs (23.1.1), my Slime (1:20090908-1 according
>>> to Synaptic) and Clisp were all apt-got. Can this be sorted out? Or must I
>>> blitz my hard drive, install NetBSD, Stump, and everything Lisp from
>>> source?
>>
>> The error message is about the CLC package which is the Debian's common-lisp-
>> controller (some sort of infrastructure that is now mostly obsoleted). It
>> looks like that SLIME in Debian/Ubuntu is set up to use CLC and SBCL doesn't
>> know how to load it (because probably Debian's SBCL packages also install
>> configuration files). But you probably don't need CLC, so you can just install
>> vanilla version of SLIME instead of the one provided in repository.
>>
>> ----
>> Кальянов Дмитрий
>>
> 
> Obsolete?  Why do you say that?  Version 7.2 is in unstable
> http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=common-lisp-controller.
> It seems very much alive to me.
> 
> Indeed the problem originally reported is that the sbcl is not
> clc-ized, having come from an external source, whereas other lisp
> tools (like slime) are coming from the repository.  You can check my
> blog http://lhealy.livejournal.com/11629.html showing how I clc-ized
> CCL, and look at the links there to the "Common Lisp in Debian"
> manual.
> 
> Liam

Gentoo used to use common-lisp-controller. They copied the lisp
configuration from debian. But now if you use the gentoo lisp overlay (as
you must if you want any lisp packages that are remotely up to date), you
will find that support for it has been removed. Then you have to install a
couple other packages that take over some of what common-lisp-controller does:

cl-asdf
dev-lisp/cl-asdf-binary-locations

Of course you don't worry about it because they are pulled in as
dependencies as soon as you try to emerge any ASDF package. But perhaps
common-lisp-controller is optional in debian? The CLiki page seems to hint
at this:

http://www.cliki.net/common-lisp-controller

So by all means use the SBCL package from the Ubuntu repository, and make
sure clc is installed as well. You'll get a nice /etc/sbclrc (or equivalent)
config file for free. And, if debian is is cool as gentoo, all your .fasl
files will go into ~/.fasls/, which makes them easy to clean.

Carlos