Hi,
I'd like to propose the following feature, implemented in the attached patch: to allow slime-lisp-implementations to specify a list of strings to augment the process environment of the Lisp process. I've a couple of uses for this feature:
(1) to run SLIME out of an SBCL build directory, with an implementation specification like this:
(sbcl-cvs ("/home/me/sbcl-cvs/src/runtime/sbcl" "--core" "/home/me/sbcl-cvs/output/sbcl.core") :program-environment ("SBCL_HOME=/home/me/sbcl-cvs/contrib/"))
(2) to work with Lisp applications that need environment variables during initialization, which variables I don't want to set Emacs-wide (because they might leak into unrelated things I do in other buffers, etc):
(myworld-v1 ("/path/to/myworld-v1/bin/myworld") :program-environment ("LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/path/to/myworld-v1/lib/") (myworld-v2 ("/path/to/myworld-v2/bin/myworld") :program-environment ("LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/path/to/myworld-v2/lib/"))
I know these things can already be done with wrapper scripts (and they still can), but I find wrapper scripts less pleasant to maintain than my .emacs file.
The patch has been tested under GNU Emacs CVS and Xemacs 21.4. If the feature is okay but the implementation needs work in order to be merged, please let me know.
Thanks, RmK