[xcvb-devel] XCVB 0.554

[Faré]

I released a tarball of XCVB 0.554.
It should hopefully work pretty well on any of CCL, CLISP, SBCL.

Most notable recent changes:

* Support for CMUCL, SCL, LWpro as full targets.

* Limited support for ECL, ABCL, XCL, GCL as targets.

* On CCL, CLISP, SBCL, LWpro, xcvb can create standalone executables
  (no cl-launch involved).

* Has a "simple-build" backend, which builds (serially) without Make.
  Should work on Windows (not tested, though - any Windows hacker?)

* The (parallelizing) Make backend is still well supported, as are
  the ASDF backend, POIU backend, slave mode, etc.

* xcvb-bridge.asd allows you to include XCVB builds in your ASDF systems.

* The XCVB driver (no more separate master) can drive XCVB in slave mode
  to build FASLs cleanly then load them into the current image.
  Provides the interactivity of ASDF without the dirty build.

* Debugging output has been much improved, and many failure modes have
  better error messages.

XCVB doesn't pass its release-test, because the release-test fails to
clean between implementations. But any single implementation passes tests,
and I have a working pure-Lisp replacement for the current shell script
to drive all the testing.

Many thanks to Peter Keller, my pair programmer, who did a lot of work,
and enabled and motivated me on whatever I did.

Next priorities, depending on your input:

* Get ECL as a valid target (still).

* Testing on Windows?

* Have a "reverse slave" mode for universal access.
  Cleanup the "manifest" infrastructure.

* Complete migrate of tests to new Lisp infrastructure.

* Start working on advanced features?

* Make our efficient parallelizing backend more robust and usable.


Is anyone still interested in XCVB? We need testers and early adopters,
or god forbids, developers. XCVB 0.554 is ready to be used.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
If you're a quiet, law-abiding citizen most of the time but occasionally cut
someone up and bury them in your backyard, you're a bad guy.
	— Paul Graham, "The Power of the Marginal"