Today is random asides day#

Mon, 01 Jul 2002 23:47:22 +0000

Today is random asides day

On Living with Packages

1. don't ever use common-lisp-user for anything bigger than a noddy two-line test function. Anything important enough to get saved in a source file is important enough to set up a package for.

2. define your package(s) using defpackage forms. I usually put these in their own source files, too.

3. every file starts with an (in-package :package-name) form - except the file with the defpackage form, anyway

4. make sure you load the files containing the defpackage forms before any of the other files

5. use-package, import or any of the other "imperative" package stuff is, like the use of eval, generally an indication that you're doing something wrong. Not always, no. Usually

6. a defsystem utility (e.g. mk-defsystem or - my preference - asdf) will automate the loading-stuff-in-the-right-order aspect

On being ill

Well, slightly under the weather at least. This weekend I had a wedding (not my own, no), a barbecue, a party and a nose full of microwaved cotton wool. Last Friday I had an all-afternoon wish to lie down and sleep unobtrusively in the middle of the carpet, which I now realise was probably early cold symptoms, plus a bunch of scary disk error messages from my colo box (Rackspace fitted a new disk, upgrading the OS version while they were at it, then I just had to reinstall all the locally-changed stuff), plus an evening in the pub. This is all in the nature of an excuse for not having done much hacking lately.

On naming

What really wasn't helping too much is that I'd originally set out at the start of the week to add some form of access control to the CLiki application (the CLiki site will stay as it is, but there are lots of other applications I'm imagining for which it would be better to know who the users are and whether they're Allowed), realised that the handler system for Araneida is suckier than it really wants to be for these kinds of application, and ended up redesigning large parts of it. And now I've created a new class called handler, I find that I want to introduce lots of new GFs whose names clash with existing Araneida functions. So perhaps this is time for a name change. Nobody appears to have produced http serving software called Boris yet, which is a pretty compelling reason in itself.

Anyway, we've got to a state where it basically runs again, so maybe we can get this wrapped up in time for Thursday