Proposal for "apropos" feature that searches exported symbols across all quicklisp libraries - Quicklisp

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Message from discussion Proposal for "apropos" feature that searches exported symbols across all quicklisp libraries
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Date: Sat, 19 May 2012 11:07:23 +0300
Message-ID: <CAOUqiQ1EAyooBeaXtKPUm=DKVWQws7bCF7sFybsUmm=wCmx...@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [quicklisp] Re: Proposal for "apropos" feature that searches
 exported symbols across all quicklisp libraries
From: =?UTF-8?Q?Mihai_C=C4=83lin_Bazon?= <mihai.ba...@gmail.com>
To: quicklisp@googlegroups.com
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The other day I was looking for a function to XML-encode a string.  I
thought there must be one in CXML, which I had loaded, but I couldn't
find it in a couple of minutes (Google didn't help either) so I wrote
it myself.

It would be nice if Quicklisp had such a search feature.  I'm pretty
sure 90% of my utils.lisp could be found in other projects :-) (but
that's how it happens when searching is harder than writing the
code...)

-Mihai

On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 8:41 AM, Paul Sexton <psexton...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Obviously it would be much easier to extract exported symbols if all
> the packages were actually loaded by the lisp image.
> Probably not a very robust design however. Maybe one could batch-
> process each quicklisp library in turn -- load it into a lisp, extract
> exported symbols and save them somewhere, then quit.
>
>
> On May 19, 2:55=C2=A0pm, "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <p...@informatimago.com>
> wrote:
>> Paul Sexton <psexton...@gmail.com> writes:
>> > Yes, I'm aware of slime-apropos, and packages like lispdoc. They only
>> > operate on installed/loaded packages. There are > 700 libraries
>> > bundled with quicklisp -- most users only use a small handful, and are
>> > ignorant of most of the others. There is a great deal of duplication
>> > of code (particularly "utility" functions). Many of the libraries have
>> > names which communicate nothing about their function. I wonder how
>> > many versions of "with-gensyms" are in those libraries?
>>
>> > A global apropos would allow users to find out what is actually inside
>> > all of these libraries, without the need to install them locally.
>>
>> Yes, yes, it's useful.
>>
>> But I also tried to load everything once, and save a fully loaded
>> image. =C2=A0It was rather successful (only half a dozen system couldn't=
 be
>> loaded in the implementation I used). =C2=A0The saved image wasn't
>> excessively big. =C2=A0I should try it again=E2=80=A6
>>
>> --
>> __Pascal Bourguignon__ =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =
=C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0http://www.informatimago.com/
>> A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.



--=20
Mihai Bazon,
http://mihai.bazon.net/blog
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