On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 1:44 PM, Robert P. Goldman <rpgoldman@sift.net> wrote:

I'm starting to be inclined to suggest we abandon support for this kind of operation on Lispworks. Lispworks does not provide a portable means to invoke from the command-line, indeed invocation from the command line is *IMPOSSIBLE* unless you pay extra for a Professional license. Also, image-dumping is only possible if you have a Professional license.

What's even The Right Thing here? Should we be checking to see if image creation is possible? And how do we capture the fact that some of our stuff requires that the user create a LW image that can be invoked from the command line w/o starting up the IDE?

I really wish they would ship with a simple command-line executable...

LispWorks Personal Edition is known not to process command-line arguments or configuration files at all and always start a graphical environment. LispWorks granted me a professional license for the sake of testing ASDF on Linux. The image support is working for me. I don't have a license on Windows or on Mac, but so far as I can tell, it's working there, too. I'm sure they'll grant you a test license if you ask them gently at lisp-sales@lispworks.com. lisp-invocation, after cl-launch, works around the failure of LispWorks 6 to correctly handle command-line arguments by creating a temporary script in which the arguments are properly initialized and telling LispWorks to load this script. lisp-recently disabled this trick in the hope that it would not be necessary on LispWorks 7 since the release notes mentioned a command-line parsing bug as being fixed. However, after paging the entire issue back into working memory, reading the documentation of LispWorks and the comments of cl-launch and lisp-invocation, and running tests, I concluded that the hack was still required for LispWorks 7.0.0 and I reinstated it in lisp-invocation (it had never been removed in cl-launch). My mistake for believing the hack wasn't necessary, just because *another* bug had been fixed in LispWorks command-line argument handling on Windows... (that latter bug is the reason why asdf tests are being invoked with such funky space-less command-lines; I haven't run cross-implementation tests to check that this kluge wasn't required anymore, so won't try to disable it.) As for image dumping, so far it looks to me as if it's working fine on LispWorks Professional. In recent times when SBCL had broken Exscribe, I briefly used LispWorks instead, proving that yes you can dump images for non-trivial applications using LispWorks and cl-launch. Yes, a cl-launch-produced script is still required as a front-end to process command-line arguments correctly. —♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org Hi! I'm a signature virus. Copy me into your sig file and help me spread!