A monthly summary of Free ("as in Freedom") CL Hackery news-that-I-know-about. December 2001
This month: OpenMCL, GCL, McCLIM, CMUCL, SBCL, UncommonSQL, CLOCC
For submission information, see the bottom of the page
There's once again a new version of the interface database; this version uses Berkeley DB v1 (instead of GDBM) as the database engine. You need to have the shared library "libdb1.so" installed on your system (probably in /lib or /usr/lib); with many LinuxPPC distributions, this library is packaged with the standard C library, but I suppose that some distributions may package it separately.
I'd hoped that the interface database wouldn't change with every OpenMCL release; if I remember correctly, this is two in a row where it has. Knock wood, they'll stay stable for a while.
There are some new features and bug fixes as well ...
OpenMCL is now also available as part of the Debian "unstable" distribution, thanks to Christophe Rhodes and Jonathan Hseu
Greetings! This is just to let everyone know about a few GCL related developments. I thought I'd continue posting these to this list for a little while, until the new gcl-devel list takes hold. 1) Web site up at http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gcl/ CVS tree imported from Dr. Schelter's last tree at utexas. Several patches uploaded. 2) New list gcl-devel@gnu.org 3) I've backported a few items from gcl-2.4.0 to get a stable CVS build. Will commit in a day or two after some testing. This includes a patch Dr. Schelter sent me before he passed away, which for some reason never made it into CVS, and which cleared up segfaults on Debian systems.The initial concentration seems to have been on getting the CVS tree (which was a work-in-progress) to build. There's also been progress on getting it to work in Windows environments using Cygwin.
CLIM, The Common Lisp Interface Manager (http://ww.telent.net/cliki/CLIM), is a specification for both a cross-GUI toolkit and a powerful substrate for many advanced interface features. McCLIM, a free implementation of CLIM, has recently seen some progress in a couple of areas. It now contains an implementation of extended input streams, which treat character input and pointer gestures uniformly, and encapsulating streams, which allow one to wrap and coopt the operations of an existing stream. In CLIM this is used to implement input editing on streams. McCLIM also now contains an early implementation of presentation types. Presentation types are used to "tag" output -- textual or graphic -- with a Lisp object and type, and then have that output be suitable as input when objects of that type are desired for input.
Nightly tarballs of the McCLIM CVS tree are available at the McCLIM project page -
After their hosting problems earlier in the year, the CMUCL network resources came back in something of a piecemeal fashion. During December, the web site returned: http://www.cons.org/cmucl/ is now available.
Experimental binaries, similar to the upcoming 18d release, have been made available for testing. Find them in the binaries directory of your nearest download mirror
December was something of a "work in progress" month for SBCL projects. Things happened, but generally speaking, nothing you could actually use yet.
Brian Spilsbury made further progress towards Unicode support
Daniel Barlow and Christophe Rhodes together made another attempt on PPC support. Two problems down, n to go: for details, see the SBCL Internals Cliki
Christophe Rhodes now has working signal handlers in the SPARC/Linux port, by dint of the ST_FLUSH_WINDOWS trap and having the signal handlers grovel around on the stack to look for the missing registers.
The db-sockets library will imminently gain a number of bugfixes and the ability to talk to unix domain sockets.
Debian packages for SBCL 0.6.13 are now in the `testing' distribution. If no release-critical bugs are reported, SBCL could be in the next stable Debian version, so if you're a Debian user, please have a play with them.
UncommonSQL is a toolkit for accessing SQL databases from Common Lisp. Patterned after the Xanalys CommonSQL package, it supports (to greater or lesser extents) PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle, and runs on CMUCL, SBCL, and Lispworks. Most of the development happens using CMUCL and PostgreSQL, so if you have a free choice of implementation and database, they're probably the ones to go for.
SBCL support is new in December, although based on patches originally made back in May and in production use since then.
You can see examples of UncommonSQL use at http://alpha.onshored.com/lisp-software/uncommonsql/doc/usql-tutorial.lisp
A new release of CLUE and CLIO was made towards the end of the month, using the code in CLOCC. New features: "This time the demos actually work and the code compiles ;-) "
** cl-local-time - Common Lisp package for date and time manipulation
** cl-local-time-db - Common Lisp package for date and time manipulation
cl-local-time (1.1.0-1) unstable; urgency=low
* new upstream version
* package name changed to cl-local-time
* split off package cl-local-time-db, depends on cl-local-time and
cl-uncommonsql
* policy upgraded to 3.5.6
* architecture should be 'any' not 'all' -- these are arch-indep
* debian/*: misc housecleaning
* debian/control: fix Jesse's address
* debian/control: conflicts with cCLan packages onshore-local-time and
onshore-local-time-db
** cl-odcl - onShore Development Common Lisp utilities
cl-odcl (1.1.0-1) unstable; urgency=low
* new upstream version
* change package name to cl-odcl
* policy upgraded to 3.5.6
* architecture should be 'any' not 'all' -- these are arch-indep
* debian/control: fix Jesse's address
* debian/rules: housekeeping updates, closer common-lisp-controller
compliance
** cl-metadata - Simple metadata system built atop UncommonSQL
** cl-uncommonsql - Commmon Lisp database access kit
** cl-uncommonsql-mysql - UncommonSQL database backend, MySQL
** cl-uncommonsql-oracle - UncommonSQL database backend, Oracle
** cl-uncommonsql-postgresql - UncommonSQL database backend, PostgreSQL
cl-uncommonsql (1.1.0-1) unstable; urgency=low
* new upstream version
* change the package name, adding the 'cl-' prefix for Common Lisp
* Rahul Jain <rahul@rice.edu>:
suggestions and patches to help split up the packages:
cl-metadata, cl-uncommonsql-{postgresql,mysql,oracle}
* plenty of housekeeping and rewrite in debian/*; more closer adherence
to common-lisp-controller standards
** common-lisp-controller - This is a common lisp source and compiler manager.
common-lisp-controller (2.10.1) unstable; urgency=medium
* Right. OpenMCL disaster strikes again. Band-aid applied.
** ilisp - Package for interacting with LISPs using EMACSes
ilisp (5.11.1-5cCLan2) unstable; urgency=low
* Updated OpenMCL support for 0.9 (inspect works!)
** langband-engine - The Langband engine
** langband-vanilla - A Vanilla-Angband plugin to the langband-engine
** langband-zterm - The Langband term-libs
langband (0.0.17-1) unstable; urgency=low
* Upstream release, see upstream Changelogs.
** openmcl - experimental package of the OpenMCL Common Lisp compiler
openmcl (0.9-1) unstable; urgency=low
* New upstream. Many packaging bugs probably reintroduced.
** sbcl - Steel Bank Common Lisp, a fork from CMUCL
sbcl (0.6.13-3) unstable; urgency=low
* Fixed common-lisp-controller integration.
"Free The X3J Thirteen" is compiled once a month by me (Daniel Barlow) from news that I know about. If you're associated with a free CL project that's under-represented here, all you have to do is send me news so that I know about it. Email me! I'd especially like to hear news from CLISP and OpenMCL people because I don't often have time to follow that myself