They say that once you've learnt to ride a bike you never forget#

Fri, 18 Apr 2003 03:50:35 +0000

They say that once you've learnt to ride a bike you never forget. Or is that elephants? I have trouble visualising an elephant riding a bicycle, but suspect it needs one like a woman needs a fish.

Anyway. Um. Not cycling, but I hope some similar law of nature applies to driving a car, because not having sat behind the wheel of one since about 13 months ago, I've rented a vehicle to get me to Milton Keynes on Tuesday.

(Car hire companies all seem to have this bizarre rule that you can't hire a car until your driving license is at least a year old. Makes no sense to me, but never mind)

So I've been working a little more on this packaging lark, trying to beat ilisp into the kind of shape that it will install and do anything useful without requiring the services of an emacs guru. Which involved what looks suspiciously like an emacs bug. (Phoenix 0.5 users are cautioned against clicking on that link: at least on my machine, it hangs the browser). I'm being continually reminded that there's lots of stuff that I as a relatively seasoned lisp user don't usually even notice, but which would probably cause the newbie to reach for his support line. Or (which is probably just as bad) cause him to develop a tolerance for random spewage which would lead to his missing messages that actually are important.

Anyway, now you can type circle at a shell prompt, and it updates your .emacs file, launches emacs, starts sbcl, that kind of stuff. And so we edge gradually closer to something that's actually usable.

And fixed a few random SBCL threading bugs. I still need to muck around with the wait queues a little, and probably to export the symbols from timer-related functions, but I think we're at the point where we could usefully put out pre-release binaries to pick up a slightly wider test audience. (I believe that Debian unstable users can do this already, thanks to kmr: apt-get install sbcl-mt. If they are doing, though, they aren't reporting bugs)