Re: a couple of vn-cclan package procedure questions

Quoting Miles Egan ([email protected]):
| I've been messing around with asdf and some vn-cclan packages and I've
| come up with a few questions.
| 
| 1. Should we assimilate parts of clocc?

Feel free to add parts of CLOCC, but please check licenses of the
various code and that there are no hidden dependencies.  However,
I suspect that if you adopt parts of CLOCC you must maintain the
cclan-package yourself as CLOCC seems to use a different way of
building the system and reference parts of CLOCC, as well as
establishing and depending on some logical pathnames.  For the first
version of cclan I made clocc-port because it was relatively simple
and could provide a decent template for other cclan-packages.  I
have not had time to maintain it so if you want to use it as a
test-case feel free to use that as a start. 

| become a fork.  Other pieces are more interdependent though, and
| pulling them out and making them work in vn-cclan might amount to a
| fork.  Any thoughts?  Rewrite this stuff?  Fork?  Build tools that can
| build asdf packages from a clocc snapshot?

Work with the clocc-people if possible, if not fork.  I mostly view
CLOCC as a common cvs-tree for various wildly different packages 
rather than an integrated whole though. 
 
| 2. How should vn-cclan packages be named?
| There's already a couple of conventions in play in the current
| repository.  I'm not a big fan of the domain-style names (com.foo.bar)
| because they emphasize an ephemeral and non-descriptive property of
| the package.  CPAN seems to have gotten along great without them.

Some people implement the same functionality in different libraries
and programs.  These must have different names.  xml-parser seems to
be something every other lisper implements and they can't all be
called Parser::XML (to use a CPAN name)  It's not even given that
the packages will have the same interface, not even within different 
versions of the same package. 

| Prefixing the packages with CL seems silly too since they'll all be
| common lisp.

That's a debian-thing and helped debianites to see what came from cclan 
and what did not.  That worked.  If there will be a debianified 
mirror of vn-cclan this might still work. 

I must admit that I've been busy with other things of late and I
am unsure how much software exist for vn-cclan.  But I don't think
it will fly before we have an "apt-get"-style utility.  So if someone
needs a small project, maybe one could hack a small http client to
fetch the necessary data from a repository about available packages,
their versions and possibly get them.  

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
Stig Erik Sandoe     [email protected]    http://www.ii.uib.no/~stig/


-------------------------------------------------------
Sponsored by:
ThinkGeek at http://www.ThinkGeek.com/