pan pan pan

[pvaneynd]

After some consideration I must conclude that the state of the Common Lisp packages in Debian is becoming unreasonable. One of the goals of forming the pkg-common-lisp team was that I would not be a bottleneck, as RL is inflicting more and more damage to my 'Debian playtime'.

Now that Luca left I'm basically the only 'active' (for very small values of active) DD/DM left. (no hard feeling towards anybody, just loads of thanks for the work they did)

I see two alternatives:

• other people get involved, investigating bugs and sending git/darcs/whatever format patches.


• we go low impact and remove common-lisp-controller and all Common Lisp libraries, and I/we only package the lisp implementations (clisp, ecl, sbcl, cmucl and perhaps ccl) without any special changes

I don't expect the first alternative to be realistic, so unless proven wrong I'll RFA/RM all the libraries/clc on the 5th of September.

Comments

Maybe I can help

[octopodial-chrome.com (from livejournal.com)]

I've really appreciated common-lisp-controller on both Fedora and Ubuntu. What exactly do you need to help pick up the slack?

Also, I don't really think that clbuild is the right approach...it downloads new code instead of letting the OS package manager handle it.

Re: Maybe I can help

[pvaneynd]

Well the problem is more or less 'death by a thousand paper-cuts'.

Updating a library package does not take a lot of time, but most don't work well with debian/watch so you have to download the image/pull the newest sources and find out.

Updating an implementation is more time consuming and complex. But there are fewer of them of course.

Reacting and triaging of bugs is a major headache. Not only do people always expect the system to DWIM (for example 508922 which I can expect), but the whole C-oriented way of working in Linux often causes problems that are difficult to fix (for example 402508). Then there are of course all the bugs I caused :-(... (for example: 535305)

Just investigating them takes a lot of time, often there is no good solution and the bug just sits there in the BTS, rotting...