Hi Anton,

Thanks for asking about this -- I have not started experimenting with this yet in earnest. 

My main concern is the internals of asdf and Quicklisp itself. Setting ql:*quicklisp-home* at new image startup time at least does appear to allow Quicklisp itself to function normally with the new local quicklisp/ directory. The main problem I was having trouble previously was re-initializing asdf output-translations. They were getting "stuck" to something hardcoded to an absolute pathname under "/home/dcooper8/.." (or Windows equivalent)  which of course is a no-go for a target delivery machine. 

I still have not managed to re-initialize asdf output-translations to the local home-directory cache of the target user, which is the desired outcome. The best I have managed so far is to disable output-translations entirely, so that the fasl's end up near the sources. This is not an ideal scenario because the target user loses for example the platform-separation benefits of output-translations. 

I have not yet tried Fare's latest advice or looked at re-initializing output-translations recently. I have to do it very soon however so I will let you know where things end up. 

For the particular case of webserver applications which rely on static files: I am not yet familiar with Hunchentoot, but Allegroserve has the concept of publishing static files with functions "publish-file" and "publish-directory." 

At startup time, our standard restart-init-function (for internal development and for deployed applications) establishes the local installation directory, which also determines the location of ql:*quicklisp-home* -- and we simply re-publish (with Allegroserve's publish-file or publish-directory operators) the static files. We do not attempt to have Allegroserve magically reproduce the published locations of static files in a newly started image - we always explicitly call publish-file or publish-directory as part of the restart-init-function.  I would think that any library which depends on static files in a similar way should provide a "publish-resources" function which can be called as part of a restart-init-function for any image. 

Anyway I will keep you apprised of progress in the next days while I am trying to prepare images for distribution. 

Regards

 Dave





On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 1:32 PM, Anton Vodonosov <avodonosov@yandex.ru> wrote:
Dave, do you have success with moving saved lisp image to new machine/directory,
when the image has asdf and quicklisp loaded?

I am trying this too, and (asdf:clear-configuration) is not enough for systems
loaded from quicklisp.

For example many libraries keep static files, like .html, .css in their repositories.
And at run-time access these resources with asdf:system-relative-pathname.

The simplest example is hunchentoot. If you do
  (ql:quickload :hunchentoot)
  (hunchentoot:start (make-instance 'hunchentoot:easy-acceptor :port 4242))

and open http://127.0.0.1:4242/ you see hunchentoot default page and documentation.
These pages are served from quicklisp\dists\quicklisp\software\hunchentoot-1.2.7\www\

When I save a lisp image and copy the image together with quicklisp/ directory
to another location, the libraries can not locate their static files. In my example,
hunchentoot says "The requested URL / was not found on this server."

I have tried to (asdf:clear-configuration) before saving the image and after
image is restored to
  (setf ql:*quicklisp-home* (truename (merge-pathnames "quicklisp/" *default-pathname-defaults*)))
  (ql:setup)
but it didn't help.

So saving lisp image only work for me in tiny applications where I know there
is no need for resources from file system.

For general use, where application depends on many libraries I am afraid there
is no way to make relocatable lisp images. Even if I find a way to reinitialize
asdf and quicklisp configurations, there are libraries which have their own custom
variables holding file system paths. For such applications I only see one reliable
way - prebuild all the .fals files with disabled asdf-output-translations so that
.fals files are placed near the sources. Then copy full application and library
sources to new location and reload them by (load "quicklisp/setup.lisp") (ql:quickload :my-application).

Best regards,
- Anton




--
My Best,

Dave Cooper, Genworks Support
david.cooper@genworks.com, dave.genworks.com(skype)
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