(Misclicked and the message was sent before it was finished. Grrr.)

On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 09:02, Pascal Costanza pc@p-cos.net wrote:

I'd like to get an idea what the current plans for RMCL are, if any. Since the switch to OS X 10.7, there is no default support for old PowerPC applications on OS X anymore, so RMCL doesn't work anymore, at least not without a major effort. Are there any plans to find a remedy for this situation? Or will RMCL effectively become deprecated?

As usual, I will accept patches. I will not be able to test RMCL anymore.

I'm asking for the following reasons: When ASDF was changed from 1.x to 2.x, this caused some problems for RMCL, which I eventually resolved by using Common Lisp's logical pathnames for the systems I maintain (primarily Closer to MOP and ContextL). However, the current maintainers of ASDF have an unjustified very low regard for logical pathnames, which causes a lot of pain - basically, whenever a new version of a Common Lisp implementation comes bundled with a new ASDF version, I have to deal with bugs in ASDF that in one way or the other break my setup with logical pathnames.

The problems were fixed as soon as a suitable bug report was provided (i.e. not by you).

James Anderson and I have gone through a lot of trouble to make sure that logical pathnames were well supported by ASDF. There again, there have been bugs that have been fixed as soon as reported.

Since my time is limited and is better served on things other than producing bug reports for ASDF (which is a tool that should be much more stable than it currently is), I decided now that it is better to drop logical pathnames

No one is going to support you magically when you don't report bugs.

and go for the Unix-like names that the ASDF maintainers seem to strongly prefer. RMCL would be the only Common Lisp implementation that would cause a problem in this regard.

Ever since 2.016.2 last June, ASDF has supported Unix-style pathnames in RMCL for its configuration files. No problem to be caused.

So, what's the verdict?

You can keep MCL running in a PowerPC emulator in a OS X 10.6 virtual machine under some hypervisor; we won't, but we'll be glad to support you whenever you report bugs.

Actually, maybe you can help us properly support RMCL with respect to encodings. Does MCL have external formats? What are acceptable external format arguments?

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org

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I'm asking for the following reasons: When ASDF was changed from 1.x to 2.x, this caused some problems for RMCL, which I eventually resolved by using Common Lisp's logical pathnames for the systems I maintain (primarily Closer to MOP and ContextL). However, the current maintainers of ASDF have an unjustified very low regard for logical pathnames, which causes a lot of pain - basically, whenever a new version of a Common Lisp implementation comes bundled with a new ASDF version, I have to deal with bugs in ASDF that in one way or the other break my setup with logical pathnames.

The problems were fixed as soon as a suitable bug report was provided (i.e. not by you).

I have submitted bug reports, and provided descriptions of my setup (I think, actually, more than once). Have you entered them in the test suite for ASDF? (Do you have a test suite for ASDF?) I find it hard to believe they don't show up on your side if you continue testing that setup. (The bugs occur in SBCL, Clozure and LispWorks, for example…)

No, you have (1) submitted "it hasn't been working for months" reports, rather than submit a bug report a few months earlier; (2) repeatedly failed to give detailed bug reports, so we can only guess what the failure is; (3) systematically failed to respond when I committed fixes (based on someone else's report) and subsequently inquired whether the fix worked for you. (4) been more and more abusive in your emails.

I have just spend quite a few hours adding test cases for logical-pathnames (my, are they confusing - see for instance this bug I filed: https://bugs.launchpad.net/sbcl/+bug/980023 Definitely not something I'll recommend for anyone to try).

I added a test file to our test-suite with various use cases forways to use logical-pathnames (yes, I know, I could have done so earlier; so could you. Why do I, who despises logical-pathnames and think they are a bad idea, have to support them, spend hours on the task, and get insulted for it?) I found that checkin 2.017.6 b7aa30f74a4f94908ca17fc82193f4f7b47912a6, designed to make the effect of loading asd files more consistent by binding *default-pathname-defaults* to the file's directory, interacted badly with logical-pathnames on most implementations. http://trac.clozure.com/ccl/ticket/953 After a fix of translate-logical-pathname'ing before to bind, it all works on CCL, but unhappily not on several other Lisps I've tried. There are therefore more bugs in ASDF's support for logical pathnames.

I note that no user of logical-pathnames has reported any error for months. I apologize for being bad at supporting them, with bugs get fixing only in a matter of days. Of course, if you upgrade your support contract to Platinum, we'll give you fixes in hours.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org The best place to find a helping hand is at the end of your own arm.

On 11 Apr 2012, at 17:48, Robert Goldman wrote:

On 4/11/12 Apr 11 -8:02 AM, Pascal Costanza wrote:

...

Hi,

I'd like to get an idea what the current plans for RMCL are, if any. Since the switch to OS X 10.7, there is no default support for old PowerPC applications on OS X anymore, so RMCL doesn't work anymore, at least not without a major effort. Are there any plans to find a remedy for this situation? Or will RMCL effectively become deprecated?

I'm sorry --- will you please clarify? How would ASDF help the process of finding support for RMCL on OS X Lion?

If RMCL is going to die of old age, I would certainly not mind killing support for it, but I don't see how the ASDF maintainers can determine whether RMCL will die out. That seems down to some combination of Apple, RMCL maintainers, if any, and RMCL users. Seems like it's more for you to tell us whether this support can be dropped or not.

Thanks for any information.

That paragraph was not about ASDF.

I have just installed Clozure 1.8, and the ASDF version that comes bundled with it (2.20) breaks my setup for ASDF systems using logical pathnames. That happens all the time (with recent new versions of LispWorks or SBCL, for example), and it is very annoying to keep track of which version of ASDF works and which doesn't.

I am now considering changing my setup away from logical pathnames, in the hope that I don't have to worry that much about ASDF anymore. However, this means that I can't use a portable setup anymore, so I am trying to figure out to what extent this is still important. That's what the paragraph above is about. (Sorry for cross-posting, but I think it's important to see this in context.)

Pascal

-- Pascal Costanza The views expressed in this email are my own, and not those of my employer.