I would like to setup mcclim on a new machine. I have cmucl 19d and fedora 8. I have searched the Web for clues on how to do this but much of it seems out of date with broken links. Is there anywhere I can find out in a straight forward manner what needs to be done and in what order. I have been on the mailing list for some time and it's pretty clear that mcclim is evolving rapidly which is good. My concern is that what ever I setup be amenable to reasonably easy upgrades as mcclim grows.
The way to do this is to setup an environment that makes it easy to fetch new versions of McCLIM (and ideally the dependency libraries) from CVS, since McCLIM releases aren't done that often, so you'll miss out on many improvements, bugfixes and compatibility fixes if you only run releases. One way to do so is to use clbuild (http://common-lisp.net/project/clbuild/), which is probably the simplest way to fetch and update bleeding-edge versions of certain Lisp software. Alternatively, a common approach is to use ASDF-Install to install McCLIM, and subsequently checking out McCLIM from CVS with the usual command:
cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous:anonymous@common-lisp.net:/project/mcclim/cvsroot co mcclim
Note that currently it is also necessary to get the Flexichain library from CVS:
cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous:anonymous@common-lisp.net:/project/flexichain/cvsroot co flexichain
Flexichain doesn't normally change a lot, so in most cases the ASDF-Installable version is sufficient, but current CVS McCLIM depends on an unreleased Flexichain.
Your use of CMUCL may cause problems. CMUCL is perfectly capable of running McCLIM, and as it has both (green) threads and a fast compiler, it is probably the second-best choice after SBCL. However, CMUCL used to have some problems with forward-defined classes, which McCLIM uses in a few places. If I recall correctly, it was usually possible to get McCLIM to load by manually copying and pasting class definitions to the REPL when the errors happen during loading, after which it would load and run perfectly. This bug may have been fixed in CMUCL since I last tried it, however.