Folks-- What I'd like to see is some sort of Lisp Standard Library (lsl?) containing a full suite of packages most of us use in most of our jobs (whether writing in common lisp or not). The idea is that we can make our applications depend on this library rather than on 5 or 10 or 15 libraries located here or there.
I'm thinking: a specification/recommendation, a web page listing, a redirector for asdf-installability, some notes about which implementations support all the libraries, and, then, of course, fixing the libraries to work consistently across the participating implementations. (The idea is to choose existing, defacto packages, not to engage (yet) in some sort of spec writing.) I'm _not_ saying that the code should all reside in a single, asdf-installable package, but, rather, that all the components should stand together, are, perhaps, versioned and released together, or something like that. (In other words, while cl-ppcre can be updated and improved within the 1.0 LSL branch, any significant change would have to wait for the LSL 1.1 branch). Or perhaps some other scheme would work: I don't particularly care which. The idea, though, is that you install the LSL, start using it, then install other packages which themselves depend on the LSL. The end result is that we have an LSL distribution which at least seems, from the outside, and to the lisp newbie, to be a unified whole. What I'm most interested in is a list of the libraries, or genres that would be covered in such a thing: * networking/sockets + trivial * threads / concurrency * sql * web (http, maybe tbnl?) * regular-expressions * strings (maybe as part of utils?) * simple xml (like xmls) * full xml (Xpath, sax, dom, etc) * gui (cross platform, python has TK, for instance) * ffi * utils (like split-sequence, getopt, etc) * posix Can anyone think of anything else? Of course, more can be added over time. What I'm thinking is that the "standard library" would contain most of the primitives out of which all the more sophisticated libraries could be made. A SOAP lib, for instance, would use the networking and xml stuff. The tentative model for this is the Java world in which you've got the SDK, but then you've got the Jakarta project which has tons of goodness built on top of that. Over time, particularly useful libraries would float into the LSL and we'd get complaints about bloat rather than complaints about scarcity. Say we picked all the packages for the above and made a grid for how well those packages worked with each implementation and each other. We'd then have a good picture of the work that needs to be done. We could even issue an "LSL compliant implementation" stamp of approval, or something like that. ;) Regardless, I think setting up something like the above would be a great way to get a picture of the lisp world with regard to libraries, which is the single biggest complaint for people used to Python, Ruby, Perl and so on. What do you all think? --Keith --- Keith Irwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
