[gentoo-science] New Release Of GCL (GNU Common Lisp)

[Frank Peters <frank.peters@comcast.net>]

Hello,

GCL, or GNU Common Lisp, has been masked in Gentoo for some time,
but it's still the fastest (and best?) Lisp to be used with Maxima,
the symbolic math package.

The reason for the mask is found in the message when attempting
to emerge gcl-2.6.8-pre-release:

# Masked for increasingly many problems. Upstream is flaky and hasn't released since 2005.
# Maxima is the only consumer and can be built with sbcl or clisp.
# Hopefully upstream will do a release that we can add to revive this package.

I've been compiling the patched Fedora source (gcl-2.6.8-pre-release) to use
with Maxima and it works very well.

However, this past week, new final releases of gcl-2.6.8 and gcl-2.6.9
have officilly been made.  Does this mean that soon GCL will be unmasked
in the portage tree?

Also, if anyone happens to know, what is the reason for releasing both
gcl 2.6.8 and 2.6.9 together?  Should we just skip 2.6.8 entirely and
use 2.6.9, or is there still some virtue with 2.6.8?

Frank Peters