The premise is that ASDF running everywhere is a good thing.
Team Members
Andy Cristina - interested in fixing cygwin CLISP problems
Volunteer today
Find out more about ASDF Installation.
There has been mention of MK:DEFSYSTEM already being quite workable. Can anyone elighten us on what makes ASDF special. Some reasons:
- it's extensible (i.e. you can define new operations and system components)
- it's very popular, almost a de facto standard
- Search and maintanance of stored systems is simpler.
- Dependencies among systems can be written in a more natural way.
Known Issues
CLISP for Windows
Apparently there is no native win32 support for asdf-install under CLISP, only cygwin. (See: 'Windows Notes' here) CLISP is one of the few options for a free LISP in win32. Some people see cygwin as a barrier to adoption.
I partially disgaree with the above comments. For me asdf-install works on windows with native clisp. Only thing is that after installing the package asdf-install hangs, and I have to termnate clisp by Ctrl-C.
I think asdf-install should also support zip as an archive format.
ASDF-install requires gnu-pg, tar and gzip which are available in cygwin. The need of using cygwin versions of gzip and tar can be done away by extending the semi-complete and semi-portable common-lisp zip, and tar library implementations, and incorporating them.
--Surendra Singhi
--Andy's Notes--
Apparently there are no good versions of gnu tar for windows. The one from gnuwin32 cannot unpack archives. I've also learned that you have to have gzip in your path. The version I'm using is from msys 1.0, and cannot deal with a trailing \ on the end of the -C directory, or with any kind of space (even quoted) in the archive path. So I've done some ugly conditional modification to the installer.lisp file to make it so if you're trying to use clisp and not cygwin it will pick nicer directories. I've been playing with it off and on during my breaks today, and hopefully I'll have it working (and clean and tested) by tomorrow evening. I too hit the hanging clisp problem, but I think I can get that fixed easily enough. Or hacked around if it's a clisp problem.
I've got the core of asdf-install working, as far as I can tell. I need to make it add the site/ to the central registry, but after that things should be good. I'll finish that after work tonight and make sure I didn't break things in linux, then possibly email Gary King or send him a patch.
Okay, so I'm able to install things from the internet. My test case was cl-wiki, because it has a ton of dependencies. There were some rough issues... asdf-install, at least the windows side, can't deal with ftp, and rfc2388 is only available via ftp. Also, the b9 server is down (Is this Dan Barlow's stuff?), so I can't get the MD5 package required by tbnl. But I'm convinced that asdf-install works well enough that I can stop trying to advance functionality long enough to clean it and send it to Gary King for comments.
Further Update: 1-24-06: I've been away from my computer where I have the win32/clisp asdf install for over two weeks. It really does mostly work, but it needs more testing and it needs to not be a bunch of bad hacks. Is anyone using asdf and clisp in win32? Do you wanna test this? The diffs from a very recent (1-28-06) pull from the cclan site are available at andystuff.com/asdf-install.html I think there were few enough changes that you could look at the diff and hand copy them in if you wanted.
--End Andy's Notes--
Interest in this project was expressed by Andy Cristina
ASDF on Corman
Requires jumping through some hoops
Where else is ASDF lacking?
ASDF Sugar
(asdf:load-op 'asdf:run-op :my-app)
(asdf:load-op 'asdf:demo-op :my-app)
(asdf:load-op 'asdf:help-op :my-app)
IMHO this could do with a little sugar for newbies, something like:
(asdf:help)
if I'm in my app's package, or at most
(asdf:help my-app)
Resources
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