I did a basic package (you can get the darcs archive at http://cl-debian.alioth.debian.org/repository/pvaneynd/cl-cedilla/)
Thanks a lot. I've just had a quick look at your package. It's after 2am over here, my apologies if the following fails to make sense. I have one serious objection. Cedilla is an end-user application, not a Common Lisp library, so I believe the package should be called ``cedilla'', not ``cl-cedilla''. The end user has no interest in the programming language Cedilla is implemented in. This is actually rather important to me: putting the programming language in the name feels provincial. It's also confusing to have to apt-get cl-cedilla when what you want is an application called Cedilla. (Never mind consistency with SuSE.) A more technical issue: when I installed your package, I couldn't run cedilla: CLC told me I didn't have the right permissions (EACCESS, with no further details). I had to run Cedilla as root once in order to get it to work. (I might have mis-built it; I used dpkg-buildpackage with no options except to change the signer, then dpkg -i.) You may want to tighten the dependency to Clisp version 2.27 or later. 2.26 has nasty bug that breaks Cedilla, and older versions do not support the ``-ansi'' flag. In the description, I would suggest replacing ``unicode text'' with ``unicode plain text''. There's also an unbalanced bracket after ``glyphs''. I would also suggest mentioning a2ps in the description, so that ``apt-cache search a2ps'' yields Cedilla. I don't have a clear opinion on this subject, but you may want to think about whether to include a Cedilla-typeset version of the README file in the package.
with a asdf file and a replacement cedilla 'executable' that calls (clc:clc-require :cedilla) and then invokes cedilla as normal. This causes a slight delay in startup.
On my machine (2.6GHz P4), that's a delay of 0.4s with a warm cache. For comparison, the basic script that I use upstream causes a delay of 0.2s. The trouble with this is that this delay is long enough to be annoying, and we definitely don't want to be confirming the ``Lisp is slow'' folklore. Do you think that it might be worth to switch to using a simple script, like the one upstream? Can such a script be automatically generated from the ASD definition? More generally, shouldn't the CL-Debian project start thinking about deployment of applications? It seems completely oriented to libraries right now.
For further integration with debian I've taken a look at defoma and at the cedilla-config.lisp file and I fear I've run into the limit of my font knowledge.
Heh.
Defoma expects me to write a perl library that can then use Defoma::Common to extract 'hints' from the font information I receive. The problem is that I see little relation between the information in these hints and the cedilla-config.lisp entries.
The cedila-config file was lovingly hand-crafted by the author ;-) OTOH, now you mention Defoma, it should be possible to augment the list of fontsets in cedilla-config with stuff produced by Defoma. But that will require some more support from Cedilla itself, so don't bother right now. I'll think about it, and let you know what I come up with. Thanks again, Juliusz