Hi Erik,

I'm sending a copy of this to the mailing list where I think we should continue this discussion.

On Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:35:10 +0100, "Erik Huelsmann" ehuels@gmail.com wrote:

I've been working on a very portable library for sockets code. This library is now more portable than trivial-sockets and supports more functionality on all of its supported lisp implementations.

If you want to support the same platforms (and all the ones I'll be adding), you could switch from the -unmaintained- trivial-sockets to usocket (http://common-lisp.net/project/usocket/).

I'm merely sending this mail to point out the existence of the library, in case you didn't know. Thanks for your time, attention and continued support for Common Lisp libraries.

I'm aware of usockets' existence because Andreas Fuchs pointed it out to me shortly after I had released the portable version of Drakma (using trivial-sockets). At that point I tried to switch to usocket and immediately ran into problems - IIRC it didn't even load on LispWorks on Windows (although ISTR the website claimed that LispWorks was a supported implementation), and it couldn't provide binary socket streams for all supported implementations. So, I dismissed it for the time being.

It might well be the case that both of these issues have been fixed since, but I currently don't have the time to test again. I generally think it's better to rely on a maintained and documented library than on obscure and old code, but of course the new code should work at least as good as the old one.

I'd be happy to accept patches to switch Drakma from trivial-sockets to usocket, but the following criteria should be met:

- The LispWorks code should remain untouched (i.e. not use usocket).

- The code should have been tested successfully on at least the Lisp/OS combinations that are currently supported by Drakma.

The actual patch itself should be a piece of cake, but I guess the testing will take some time.

Thanks, Edi.