Nick Levine nick@nicklevine.org writes:

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It doesn't seem so obvious as to where to find who might have unpicked this already. Or find documentation behind a system and its design intent. I.e. although perhaps nothing should be in Quicklisp unless pure and solid, it can be quite a goose chase to try to hunt down remedies when that does not seem the case.

I don't _think_ it's Quicklisp's concern to ensure how well things work, only that loading one doesn't break another. Some QL libraries come with test-suites, and others do not.

Your thought is correct. When wearing my Quicklisp dist maintainer hat, I do not judge the quality or necessity of a library. If someone submits a library to Quicklisp, and it builds, I add it. (In some circumstances, I do ask the submitter what might distinguish a library from the many similar libraries already availble, but even then I do not reject the library.)

But I agree that library quality / support are important parts of library discovery: if you don't know which ones are generally thought of as good, or which ones have an active support network, how can you ever choose between them? Solving the library discovery problem is probably rather people-intensive, which I imagine is why nobody's done it. I'm told other languages suffer from this too.

I think quickdocs.org helps. I would also like to see some mechanism for incorporating user feedback (e.g. "I tried this library on LispWorks and it keeps crashing" or "The documentation doesn't match the code any more" or "This is great, it solved my problem and it's really fast") and rating. Building such a thing would take a generous expenditure of time and effort, so I understand why it hasn't popped into existence already.

Zach

Erik Huelsmann ehuels@gmail.com writes:

Hi Zach,

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But I agree that library quality / support are important parts of library discovery: if you don't know which ones are generally thought of as good, or which ones have an active support network, how can you ever choose between them? Solving the library discovery problem is probably rather people-intensive, which I imagine is why nobody's done it. I'm told other languages suffer from this too.

I think quickdocs.org helps. I would also like to see some mechanism for incorporating user feedback (e.g. "I tried this library on LispWorks and it keeps crashing" or "The documentation doesn't match the code any more" or "This is great, it solved my problem and it's really fast") and rating. Building such a thing would take a generous expenditure of time and effort, so I understand why it hasn't popped into existence already.

Do you also see a role for cl-test-grid here, which tests quicklisp packaged libraries on a large number of platforms and may thus provide potential users with the insights they need for their platforms?

Yes, very much so. It would be good to know, at a glance, that some library has been tested already and is known not to work on your chosen platform.

It would also be helpful to make that information fairly detailed, on further clicking, so you can make in informed decision about how accurate it might be (how recently was it tested?), and what work it might take to get it to work, or at least to the next failure point.

For example, if some project fails to build on SBCL because it uses the LispWorks MP package, someone could see that and decide to try updating it to use bordeaux-threads instead. That might lead to a working project, or it might lead to a new failure, but at least it's some basis for making a decision about what to do.

Zach