bonasso bonasso@traclabs.com writes:

Whenever I try to export a symbol to cl-user from another package, like (export '(memory-apropos) :cl-user) while in a package called memory I get

"The symbol memory-apropos is not accessible in package COMMON-LISP-USER"

But if I do:

(in-package :cl-user) (import 'memory::memory-apropos)

it works.

Is this a bug?

No, that's how EXPORT and IMPORT work.

bonasso bonasso@traclabs.com writes:

Whenever I try to export a symbol to cl-user from another package, like (export '(memory-apropos) :cl-user) while in a package called memory I get

"The symbol memory-apropos is not accessible in package COMMON-LISP-USER"

But if I do:

(in-package :cl-user) (import 'memory::memory-apropos)

it works.

Is this a bug?

There's no bug here.

With:

(in-package :memory) (export '(memory-apropos) :cl-user)

you're asking to export from the package named "CL-USER", the symbol MEMORY::MEMORY-APROPOS that is interned into MEMORY when the lisp reader reads the EXPORT form. Since this symbol MEMORY::MEMORY-APROPOS is not present in the CL-USER package, it cannot be exported from the CL-USER package, and therefore an error is correctly signaled.

You either import memory::memory-apropos into cl-user before exporting it:

(in-package :memory) (import '(memory-apropos) :cl-user) (export '(memory-apropos) :cl-user)

or you could import cl-user::memory-apropos into memory before exporting it:

(in-package :memory) (unintern 'memory-apropos) ; remove the old one (import '(cl-user::memory-apropos) :memory) (export '(memory-apropos) :cl-user)

But in both cases, it's a little strange to be exporting from cl-user a symbol, the more so when it actually comes from the memory package.

Package named <something>-USER are intended to be leaves in the package dependency graph, so they usually don't export any symbol, and no other package uses them. Exporting a symbol from a package is only useful if you want to use that package, or if you want to use a single colon instead of the double colon to qualify those symbols.