[Openmcl-devel] Porting Wood and how to handle source code conflicts with Digitool

[Lawrence E. Bakst]

I have started trying to port Wood from MCL to openmcl.

1. If someone has done this would you please let me know?

2. So far it hasn't been too bad. Changed some ppc::subtag... to ppc32::subtag changes. However the next issue is that file-length in "l1-streams.lisp" is not compatible. MCL 5.x takes a optional second argument which wood uses. It's a trivial change. However that leads me to #3.

3. What are the licensing issues around making the changes to openmcl from MCL? I tried to  search the archives for an answer and couldn't find any. The best I could find on the web site was:

"The implementations began diverging in 1999; there's still a lot of code in common, but there's never been any real effort to keep them in synch. Code that deals with stream internals, network I/O, physical pathnames, threading, etc. is probably not generally much easier to port between MCL and OpenMCL than between any two other CL implementations (though there may be cases where it is.)"

So before I "lift" two lines of code from one to the to other, what's the scoop? Was the grant to Gary a one time thing or can some effort be made to keep things in sync?

Of course, since I own both, I am probably OK to do this for my own research purposes. I guess there are three cases.

a. If I own both can I lift from one to the other for research purposes?

b. If I own both can I lift from one to the other and then distribute an image?

c. What about checking in such changes into the openmcl source tree?

I've read the licenses and I have my own idea to these questions, but perhaps it's best just to ask first, without my speculation.

I suppose another question is, if ends up being OK to lift from certain parts of MCL to openMCL, do people want to do this?

Minor Gripe: The OpenMCL licenses should really be readable from the web site without having to download the distribution.

Even worse, I can't find the MCL 5.0 license on what I have installed, which I thought was everything. I'll have try and find my MCL 5.0 CD to see if I somehow missed it.

Best,

leb