[Openmcl-devel] OpenMCL, McCLIM, Beagle, and Bosco...

[Brent Fulgham]

> > This reminded me a bit of Mikel Evin's "Bosco" framework, which
> > helped provide a framework for creating Lisp OS X applications.  As I
> > mentioned a while ago, the sources don't seem to be available
> > anywhere (I still have a tarball of his 0.6 version, but can't find
> > his tutorial anywhere).
>
> I had thought that Bosco and Clotho were still on common-lisp.net.
> (A quick glance suggests that there's a 2-year-old copy of Clotho
> there; I didn't see Bosco.)

I've managed to collect Bosco (0.6), Clotho, and Alpaca from the network (or in some cases the Wayback Machine).  It would be nice if we could host these on the clozure domain.  Could you establish a CVS node that could be used to hold this framework and the two applications?

I can try to add notes on the Wiki related to Bosco, but I could only get the introduction to his "how-to" off of the Wayback Machine.  I recall Gary King or someone mentioning that they had a copy of the how-to someplace.  It would be great to get a copy.

I've updated the sources a bit in an effort to get it to function under OpenMCL 1.0.  The only current issue (though it's obviously a show-stopper) is that something seems to have changed in the way the generic MAKE function is resolved.  Using his pristine 0.6 tarball (which worked on OpenMCL 0.14), it now complains that it can't find "MAKE-BOSCO", though it's clearly defined in one of the included Lisp files from the "bosco.asd".  Were there any significant changes in how this worked between OpenMCL 0.14 and 1.0?  Perhaps it's actually a change in ASDF or something...

> There are some other approaches to being cross-platform: GNUStep
> runs on many interesting platforms and offers a high degree of
> Cooca compatibility.  (Bits and pieces of the ObjC bridge are
> conditionalized for the GNU ObjC runtime vs Apple's, though that's
> never worked completely and likely suffers from bitrot)  Some Linux
> distributions package GNUStep, others don't, so there's something
> of the same limited target audience issue there.

I often forget about this.  That's probably the right way to approach this (though I don't know if
the ObjC bridge is available under the Linux ports).

> Yet another approach would be solve the issue by ignoring it: the
> number of target platforms/target OSes of likely interest sadly
> isn't that large.  If you do a good job of supporting a small
> number of window systems/toolkits (Cocoa, GTK+, whatever's on
> Windows if/when that becomes relevant, ...),  you've addressed
> part of the problem. 

Well, I thought that was the point of something like McCLIM -- to abstract the platform-dependency away so that the same code could run on multiple platforms.

> > 3.  Finally, could we host the Bosco sources on OpenMCL's website
> > (and perhaps the Clotho sources, too)?
>
> Sure.

Great.  How do we start?  I have some tarballs, which I can put on a server somewhere you can reach them.
Also, could I please get CVS access to whatever archive you create for these sources?

Thanks,

-Brent