Re: Problems with McCLIM (Common Lisp)

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Guillaume,

thank you for your response!  (And to Pierre, whose comments you
commented on.)

> Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> skribis:
>
>> I’d like to play with McCLIM, but I don’t know enough about Common Lisp
>> to understand how to launch the examples.
>
> When I packaged McCLIM, I only made the packages for the main McCLIM
> library. IIRC the examples also use some extra extensions that I have
> not packaged, so they might not work out of the box (even if the error
> with mcclim-layouts/tab had not happened).
>
>> Here’s what I’ve done:
>>
>>     guix install sbcl sbcl-mcclim sbcl-slime-swank
>>
>> This is the first question, actually: if I don’t manually install
>> sbcl-slime-swank I get errors complaining about swank being absent.
>> Should sbcl-mcclim propagate sbcl-slime-swank?
>
> sbcl-slime-swank is actually an alias for cl-slime-swank because,
> according to a comment in lisp-xyz.scm, "SLIME does not have a ASDF
> system definition to build all of Swank". So in fact there is no
> pre-compiled package for Swank, and this is why it needs to be 
> available to packages that depend on it (directly or indirectly) so that
> they can compile it before using it.

But shouldn’t it then be propagated?  I had to guess that I might need
to install it.  I think it should just be installed when installing
McClim.

> The SBCL build system currently doesn't accept pre-compiled sbcl-*
> packages having a slash in their name. Slashes are replaced with
> hyphens, and the ASDF system name for the pre-compiled package for
> "mcclim-layouts/tab" is in fact "mcclim-layouts-tab". Some package
> definitions have a phase changing slashes to hyphens in asd files when
> necessary (see for example the package definition for
> sbcl-mcclim-extensions), however the asd files in
> "share/common-lisp/sbcl-source/mcclim/" still use the system names with
> slashes, this is why when loading the "clim-examples.asd" file by hand
> you get an error saying that "mcclim-layouts/tab" would not be found.

So, is this something we need to patch in all the asd files for McClim?
Or is this something we should change in the build system?

I’d like to play with McClim and all its applications to see if it would
be worth doing something like this for Guile :)

> I agree that the asdf-build-system could need an overhaul.
>
> Currently the sbcl-xxx package is the base definition and the cl-xxx and
> ecl-xxx packages are derived from it, I think it would make more sense
> make cl-xxx the base definition and derive sbcl-xxx and ecl-xxx from it.
>
> The "deliver-asd" operation has been fixed in recent versions of ASDF,
> so maybe it would be possible to use it instead of our home-made
> functions to create asd files for the bundles.
>
> Another approach could be not to use ASDF bundles at all, and just use
> the regular compilation operation of ASDF, except the fasl files would
> be put it "/gnu/store/..." instead of "$HOME/.cache/common-lisp/...",
> and our asdf-build-system would indicate to ASDF where to search for the
> files.

I don’t know enough about Common Lisp to give a valuable comment here,
but I’d very much like to be able to install Common Lisp things without
having to do additional work post installation.  Using more “default”
ways to install ASDF bundles perhaps would get us closer to a default
experience.

-- 
Ricardo