[gentoo-dev] dev-lisp

[Karl Trygve Kalleberg <karltk@prosalg.no>]

Hi gang.

I'm going to celebrate my newfound gentoo developer status by not doing
anything on gentoo at all this weekend. I'm heading out of the country for
a much-earned relaxation weekend in the Scottish highlands.

When I get back, I'm going to suggest we make a dev-lisp category. I have
two working ebuilds for that category currently: ecls-0.2 and gcl-2.4.0

I'm working on sbcl and cmucl, but here is a small problem: Neither sbcl
nor cmucl can be bootstrapped from C (or any lisp implementation we can
compile using only the C compiler). sbcl must be bootstrapped from itself
of cmucl. cmucl must be bootstrapped from itself.

What this means is that to install cmucl og sbcl, we have to first get an
x86 binary for the particular compiler, then run that as the bootstrapping
compiler.

This primarily means we will fetch and run a binary, which I don't think
is being done anywhere (except if you consider the gentoo build iso
itself as a bootstrap) until now, and that this binary will only run on
x86.

I don't necessarily see a problem with this, but it's a bit different from
all the other packages we have.

Comments, suggestions ? (I'll read them when I get back on sunday
evening).

(In the distant future, sbcl might be able to bootstrap on ecls, and cmucl
might be able to bootstrap on sbcl, so we could theoretically built it all
completely from sources for the die-hard purists, but don't hold your
breath.)

Regards,

Karl T