Re: [gentoo-lisp] [RFC] A couple of ideas

[Stelian Ionescu <sionescu@cddr.org>]

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On Fri, 2010-06-18 at 00:28 -0300, Tomás Touceda wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> So a couple of days ago we discussed with pchrist about how we will
> handle porting almost everything in the lisp-overlay to the main tree.
> We need feedback on the following ideas to solve this, so please critic
> and comment on this.
> 
> The first idea is to move all the cl-* packages from the main tree to a
> new overlay different from the official one, so we can have a clean
> start in the main tree. Since most of these packages are broken (meaning
> bad src_uri, bad deps, and who knows what else at this point), we
> thought that this won't hurt the users. Most of us are using what's in
> the overlay (and whoever isn't, please do), but either way the packages
> aren't going to disappear they're just being moved, so don't panic :).

That's a good idea

> The second idea is for mirroring all the tarballs that the cl-* packages
> use. Why do this? Well, most cl packages don't have a versioned tarball,
> so this brings a couple of problems regarding digests, and basic version
> control, so what we want to do is to build a little system to facilitate
> this job.
> 
> Here's what I've written about this second idea:
> 
> ****** Start ******
> 
> The problem:
> 
> Lisp packages' upstream don't name their tarballs with version numbers.
> When there's a new release, the tarball digest changes, and then the
> package digest fails.

That's not always true: some do this, but not all. The problem is more
with those that do not do releases at all, and just want you to get
stuff from the live repository

> A posible solution:
> 
> Build an app that controls when the tarballs are updated and notifies
> us about it in some way, and that provides a way of mirroring the tarball.
> 
> Application design:
[snip]

To me, using python and XML seems quite excessive. bash + wget + md5sum
and some simple text files is a lot easier to deal with
Also, there are a few other projects that try to write a package manager
for lisp(lispy, clbuild, quicklisp, clornucopia, a couple others that I
can't remember right now). We could join forces and have a single point
of collection for versioned tarballs and snapshots

-- 
Stelian Ionescu a.k.a. fe[nl]ix
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
http://common-lisp.net/project/iolib

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