The ulterior motive for this recent spate of CLiki hacking can now be#

Fri, 14 Jun 2002 02:08:46 +0000

The ulterior motive for this recent spate of CLiki hacking can now be (has now been) revealed: I have to talk about it in a couple of months time. Of all the projects they might have asked about (SBCL porting, asdf, cCLan, etc), they had to choose the one guaranteed to send me into apologetic fits about the quality of the code. It was a weekend hack. It shows.

"Plan" is possibly too strong a word, but we have intentions to create a shared bug database for SBCL and CMUCL, using CLiki. This involves a fair bit more structured data going into the page, so that we can perform searches for things like "give me all the bugs more than a year old that have not been fixed in sbcl" or "give me all the bugs reported in cmucl that haven't been tested in sbcl".

So presently I'm practising slash-and-burn refactoring to remove some of the worst of the hardcoded markup rules and allow people to add arbitrary indices. Who knows, maybe in the process we'll even fix it to pick up the page links and do the full-text indexing in the same pass, thereby avoiding having to reread the page twice after every edit. And fix the current-page-appears-in-own-list-of-links bug. And this also gives us an opportunity to introduce a syntax for "download" links other than the ill-conceived >(foo-bar.tar.gz) - i.e. that doesn't do bad things when people write <code>(funcall (compile nil (lambda () (* 2 3))))</code>