Earlier this week I released a couple common lisp libraries. Thus for the rest of the week I have tried to make them usable by anyone who is not me. The situation is complicated by a few facts about our development environment. Our shared lisp library directory has been accreted over more than 5 years, and some of these libraries having been patched (some in darcs and some in git and most not patched upstream). We also make heavy use of precompiled cores to speed up start up time. All of this leads to an environment that is very hard to replicate. Quicklisp to the rescue! Quicklisp makes it easy to have a lisp environment with the same set of libraries available as everybody else, which is a tremendous win when compared to our difficult-to-replicate system.

To fix the bugs other people would see in the software that builds and works fine for me, I wrote an sbcl script to perform a clean build and fetch all unknown dependencies from quicklisp. (This script is not common lisp; there is sb-xxx all over the place.) I learned quite a bit about all of the related systems, so the end result seems somewhat trivial, but perhaps it will provide decent examples. Quicklisp is easy to install, and makes deploying usable common lisp libraries MUCH easier.

By running the following script I will load and test the buildnode system using only libraries pulled from quicklisp.

~$ sbcl --script ~/run-builds.lisp --test-system buildnode --quicklisp-only

... Style warnings and other build detritus...

** TEST RESULTS: Buildnode **

-----------

ATTRIB-MANIP: 9 assertions passed, 0 failed.

CLASS-MANIP: 7 assertions passed, 0 failed.

TEST-ADD-CHILREN: 1 assertions passed, 0 failed.

TEST-BASIC-HTML-DOC: 1 assertions passed, 0 failed.

TEST-FLATTEN-&-ITER-DOM-CHILDREN: 1 assertions passed, 0 failed.

TEST-INSERT-CHILREN: 3 assertions passed, 0 failed.

TEST-ITER-CHILDREN: 6 assertions passed, 0 failed.

TEST-ITER-NODES: 6 assertions passed, 0 failed.

TEST-ITER-PARENTS: 4 assertions passed, 0 failed.

TEST-TEXT-OF-DOM: 2 assertions passed, 0 failed.

TOTAL: 40 assertions passed, 0 failed, 0 execution errors.

------ END TEST RESULTS ------

... MORE style warnings and other build detritus...



I hope to incorporate this script into an automated lisp builder soon.