On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 3:44 PM, Liam Healy lnp@healy.washington.dc.us wrote:
The dependencies worry me. I certainly understand the desire to avoid duplication of code, but making dependencies makes it harder to install. For example, none of these three dependencies is present in Debian, yet cl-cffi is. I know you're not the Debian maintainer for cl-cffi, but how would this be managed?
Obviously the Debian maintainers will have to package the dependencies as well. That shouldn't be a problem.
Difficulty of installation is a bigger barrier for those new to Lisp, and I expect that CFFI would be important for many newcomers who wish to continue to use software they used in the non-Lisp environment.
If you use clbuild today and install CFFI through it, it will happily pull the cffi+lotsastuff branch along with its 3 dependencies. ASDF-Install would do the same thing. And we could include the dependencies in a tarball linked from the main page if that turned out to be an issue; I doubt it will.
The only issue I was worrying about is release management. Making sure the libraries play well with each other, and so on. That essentially means we shouldn't let so much time go by between releases (0.9.2 was released over a year and a half ago), but I don't control Alexandria releases.
A buildbot would help with that, a lot. Any volunteers? :-)