Edi Weitz wrote:
Another project on my TBNL agenda that I started part way down was seeing if I could remove some dependencies (primarily kmrcl) without adding a whole lot a code to TBNL.
LispWorks/Hunchentoot doesn't use KMRCL, so that's the plan for SBCL and the other Lisps as well.
I had a feeling this was on your agenda as well.
Do you happen to be sold on the wonders of the Darcs version control system? ;) If you're not strongly tied to whatever VCS you're currently using, a public darcs repository could be a real boon.
You wouldn't win anything, because I immediately make a new release if I add new code. Im the case of RDNZL I once tried with a public repository, but although several people had write access nothing came out of it. The only result was that it became harder for me and I couldn't work offline anymore...
I suspected that, which is why I think you would like darcs. With darcs, everything is an offline operation - there really is no online mode so to speak. An online repository is simply a darcs working copy whose files are accessible via HTTP. You can therefore 'pull' from a HTTP repository, but not 'push' to it. Pushing across the web is handled via SSH or email. Contributions to a project such as this would likely still flow through email -- darcs just provides some (nice) tools to facilitate making and merging those contributions.
It really isn't a big deal though. Right now, I have a special weitz.de-project-updater bash/perl script which pulls the latest releases from the website periodically and tries to merge them against any local changes I'm working on, and then makes a commit to my working copy if a version update has occurred. If the project was darcs based, of course, I could truncate that process down to `darcs pull` :)
The feature of darcs which really hooked me is that you can 'cherry-pick' patches from one working copy to another. The darcs homepage is:
The advanced features, offline operation model, and distributed development capabilities, along with the conceptual elegance of the author's "Theory of Patches" is probably why this VCS has been attracting more and more projects in the lisp community, such as UCW, CFFI, detachtty, CLX, araneida, etc.
(http://bc.tech.coop/blog/050710.html)
Cheers,
-- Travis