This project has been superseded by Package and Resource Directory

A central repository for Lisp packages has been proposed as a Gardeners project.

Team Members

• Erik Enge - Motivated to help in 4 weeks time
• Marc Battyani - Creating LinkIt site for this purpose
• Paolo Amoroso
• Paul Dietz
• Humberto Ortiz Zuazaga
• Peter Seibel
• Anyone else?

Goals

• Universal ASDF capability - See: Fixing ASDF-INSTALLable packages
• Directory of packages
• Uniform access to documentation
• Host the package downloads

Resources

cCLan was an attempt at this.
CLiki lists a lot of packages in a 'distributed' fashion.
common-lisp.net hosts a bunch of projects.
Erik Enge wrote this insightful post.

Tag hierarchy

LinkIt currently allows the creation and management of a tag hierarchy with arbitrary levels of subtags. Each tag may link to other related subtags.

Each entry in the software directory will be tagged with as many tags as necessary. So, the directory will support two orthogonal, independent organizations: a graph (via the related tags relation) and a tree (the tag/sub-tag relation). Both organizations will be independently extensible.

Hare is a possible tag tree (roughly based on the categories of Common-Lisp.net projects and the CLiki home page).

Root
  AI
  Business
  Community
  Cryptography
  Database
  Development
    Benchmarking
    Documentation
  Games
  Graphics
    CAD
    GUI
  Interfacing
  Language extensions
    Compatibility layers
  Multimedia
    Music
  Network
    Distributed programming
    Email
    Web
  Science and Engineering
    Computational biology
    Electronics
    Mathematics
    Modeling and simulation
  System programming
  Text processing
    Localization
  Unclassified

Hosts

Marc Battyani has created this LinkIt site which he is offering for the use of this project.
Erik Enge has offered to host this at common-lisp.net...if he likes the implementation
Peter Seibel is interested in hosting at least the directory part as the Lisp Library List on lispniks.com. See my comment in the discussion below for some links to a mockup.

Discussion

[Paolo Amoroso] Should this be a repository with copies of the packages, or a directory with links to the actual packages? I think we should start with a directory as it is at least necessary and possibly sufficient. After that we can worry about the problem of making the downloading of libraries more reliable than they are sometimes now when the library author's website going down makes the library unacessible. --Peter Seibel

[Paul Dietz] We should collect information on each of the packages to allow work to be planned and prioritized. Information should include:

• Name of the package.
• Location of other copies of the repository (I assume a copy of the repository will be kept in a central place also).
• Dependencies with other packages.
• Current version of the package (version numbers should be standardized?)
• Date of the current version.
• Primary maintainer(s) of the package.
• A numeric score of the maturity of the package (as in Sourceforge).
• A list of high level TODOs.

I suggest there should also be a document describing overall standards for packages. For example: a package should have a test suite that achieves at least some specified level of coverage as measured by COVER.

[Peter Seibel] Quite some time ago a couple of the Bay Area Lispniks and I started work on a Lisp Library List (L3). The work died out for reasons not worth going into but we did get as far as defining a set of information we needed to gather about different libs and writing some code to deal with it and generate a nice HTML list. I've put up the data file we created at

• http://www.lispniks.com/l3/l3-master.sexp

and the resulting HTML at:

• http://www.lispniks.com/l3/package-index.html

The information there is now hopelessly out of date and I've removed the email address from the mailto links for the moment. (In a real listing we'd presumably let library authors let us know if they mind us putting their email address up on a web site to be harvested by spammers.) But hopefully there's enough there to give you an idea what we were thinking.

Anyway, this might be a reasonable starting point--if folks are interested we can start collecting deflib forms and I'll brush off the code that generates the list from them. That should at least be enough to get us going.

[Humberto Ortiz-Zuazaga] There's a page on cliki http://www.cliki.net/Current%20recommended%20libraries that has a list of "recommendations" for packages.

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