[Openmcl-devel] Cocoa-based IDE sources

[R. Matthew Emerson]

Thanks to funding from users, we've been able to do some significant  
work on the Cocoa-based IDE.

As you probably know, we use the Subversion revision control system to  
manage the CCL sources.  Ongoing development takes place in the  
trunk.  This generally works fine.

In the case of the Cocoa-based IDE, however, this has caused some  
minor trouble.  Users who are interested in improvements the IDE have  
been obliged to track and run the trunk, even though it's probably the  
case that such users would normally like to run a release.

Therefore, it seems like it might be a good idea to separate the Cocoa- 
based IDE sources in some way.

Here are some approaches we could take:

   * Make the svn external for the cocoa-ide/ directory in the release  
branches point to the cocoa-ide/ sources in the trunk.  (We do a  
similar thing already for the documentation.)  The idea would be that  
the IDE is still under rapid enough development that it doesn't make  
sense to periodically say "this is a stable release point".

   * Move the Cocoa-based IDE sources into a separate repository  
entirely.  The IDE would essentially become an application that could  
be installed, much like, e.g. Hunchentoot or McCLIM.   We could still  
use an svn external to point to the IDE sources, but maybe we would  
only do this for the Mac OS X targets.

If anyone has suggestions on how to better manage this, I'd be  
interested to hear them.