My new laptop came in on Thursday, a tiny asus eeepc. The default OS is a customized Xandros, a debian spin-off, so it was pretty easy to add some apt sources and get all the tools needed to try out clbuild. So far I’m very impressed, almost everything has just worked.
I installed darcs to download clbuild, and then it told me to install a few other tools: cvs, svn, and git. I had one error later in the process, when git tried to use curl, but after installing curl things went pretty cleanly.
I was unable to build SBCL from source using clbuild, but I think that was a sourceforge problem, not a clbuild problem. Every other installation went very smoothly.
I was particularly impressed by the ability to load emacs and slime. I find setting up emacs to be the most laborious part of getting a lisp development environment going, and the “clbuild slime” command gets me halfway there. Looking at the clbuild script, the way they do it is pretty simple, but its a nice time savings to not need to look that stuff up.
By automatically downloading a ton of code, clbuild also provided me with some nice reading, and I spent the evening hanging out with some neighbors and browsing source code, and saw some neat patterns.
When I got back home, I hacked a little on adw-charting, changing awhen and aif usages to when-let and if-let calls, which is a macro I saw in several Edi Weitz packages. when-let/if-let are a little longer than Marco Baringer’s awhen/aif, but I like the explicit names. awhen/aif introduce meaningful names into the lexical environment, and that has always made me a little nervous. Whenever names are introduced as side-effects I’m reminded of the mess that is ruby’s ActiveRecord, which has so much magical run-time craziness that your .rb file can seem totally unrelated to what actually gets executed.
I also got just about done on a nice documentation page for adw-charting, similar to Vecto’s. So similar, one might think I copy/pasted the Vecto content and changed the relevant bits. I ended up using this as an excuse to try out cl-who, which is a pretty nice library. I found a bunch of adw-charting bugs in the process. A few people have asked for source in blog comments, so my goal was to put out a 0.5 release today, but there are still some details to clear up:
- need to add some license crap to each source file (which might also be strangely similar to Vecto’s license crap)
- need to add readme / license files
- need to add some documentation about how adw-charting uses fonts
- need to sort out gpg signing / asdf-install chores
- possibly sort out apache incantations to allow read-only anonymous darcs access and submit a clbuild patch
I’ll try for Sunday.