Some interesting comments on the cirCle CD already#

Fri, 03 Oct 2003 12:02:34 +0000

Some interesting comments on the cirCle CD already. I'll send out a mail to the announcement list in a week or so when it's a bit clearer what shape things are taking, but for the moment let's answer a few of the early questions here:

1. Documentation is something I'm quite keen on. The out-of-the-box install will bring up a web server with all the docs I can get my hands on and legally distribute. Yes, sadly the Hyperspec is not one of these documents; either there'll be an installer package that downloads it from the net, or we'll do something ourselves starting with the ANSI final draft or the GCL texinfo (which appears to have been taken from the same place).

2. Several requests for an ILISP configuration that works out of the box, so that's a priority. I'm also planning to hook as much of the documentation (see above) as possible to ILISP, so that users can look up documentation for symbol at point even when that symbol is in some other package than COMMON-LISP.

3. Sources for everything will be included. This is because (a) it's a jolly good idea anyway, and (b) for GPLed components (like Emacs) the alternative is a written offer valid for three years to provide them at cost.

4. You don't have to use it as a live filesystem. If you have an existing Linux installation, the intent is that you can just install it - subject to kernel version, shared library issues and the rest of the happy fun ball of wax that is Linux compatibility. Yes, I know about the LSB. No, it's not sufficient - at least last time I looked, it doesn't specify PostgreSQL shared library versions, to take one example.

5. The live fs is Knoppix-based, but isn't going to include all the Knoppix apps and games - we'll need the space for source code. The point of using Knoppix is for the hardware detection, which seems to be pretty much universally praised.