[Openmcl-devel] RFC - init-file and asdf:*central-registry* changes

[David Steuber]

On Feb 17, 2005, at 10:36 AM, alex crain wrote:

> I like to imagine that someday soon we will not only have OpenMCL, but
> real applications that use OpenMCL as a platform, which means that 
> someone
> might want to install OpenMCL without the source tree in order to run
> the application. As much as I love lisp, it is supposed to be a 
> delivery
> agent, not an end unto itself.

Just to provide a data point...

I'm using OpenMCL on OS X with the goal of being able to deliver self 
contained application bundles.  I'm also using Carbon rather than Cocoa 
but that's a separate issue.  I'm probably doing things the hard way, 
but my current development model is to launch the application bundle 
that I have made (using save-application to create the image it uses) 
and attach to it with SLIME.  I have Swank compiled into the image.

This actually works.  I have a Carbon based window that I can use 
OpenGL to draw into via AGL.

It would be useful to me to have a simple, well documented procedure to 
specify where application specific files are supposed to go.  I 
certainly would like to be able to take advantage of OS X style 
preferences as well as simpler things like where any .init files may 
go.

It would probably be useful to have both system wide and per user 
overrides.  Just stopping at the site default probably won't work 
unless the site default can contain a simple bit of code that says to 
then move to the user's directory.  That may actually be best since it 
means that the system admin can say whether or not user customizations 
are allowed.

To reply to another mail...  I did a cvs up last night in the 
development branch and had no problems rebuilding OpenMCL  I haven't 
done any testing of it yet because I've been doing my development in 
the 0.14.2-p1 branch.  It probably wouldn't be too difficult for me to 
switch over to using the development version.  I'll see if I can do 
that.