Approximating CPAN

[Leslie P. Polzer]

CPAN and other language-specific package managers offer some things
that are especially useful at a distribution level.

For me the most important things are:

1. Ability to call the manager directly from the command line. Basic
commands should be invokable directly via command line switches, along
with the possiblity to specify one or more forms to be evaluated in a
Mudballs context (probably in CL-USER with (use-package 'mudballs).
Examples:

mudballs install hunchentoot --version 1.0
mudballs search hunchentoot --format=short
mudballs --eval "(mb:do-fancy)" # maybe implicit progn

This behavior could be provided by a custom core with getopt support
or by leveraging cl-launch (but I'm not sure whether and how the
latter would allow us to use the full power of command-line args).

2. Smart storage of installed systems depending on user permissions.
For UNIX systems the following distinction should be enough:

* for the superuser install to /usr/lib/common-lisp
* for non-superusers install to $HOME/.common-lisp

Thoughts?

[Sean Ross]

On 23 Apr 2009, at 15:56, Leslie P. Polzer wrote:

>
> CPAN and other language-specific package managers offer some things
> that are especially useful at a distribution level.
>
> For me the most important things are:
>
> 1. Ability to call the manager directly from the command line. Basic
> commands should be invokable directly via command line switches, along
> with the possiblity to specify one or more forms to be evaluated in a
> Mudballs context (probably in CL-USER with (use-package 'mudballs).
> Examples:
>
> mudballs install hunchentoot --version 1.0
> mudballs search hunchentoot --format=short
> mudballs --eval "(mb:do-fancy)" # maybe implicit progn
>
> This behavior could be provided by a custom core with getopt support
> or by leveraging cl-launch (but I'm not sure whether and how the
> latter would allow us to use the full power of command-line args).

Agreed, I think it would be a useful tool.

>
> 2. Smart storage of installed systems depending on user permissions.
> For UNIX systems the following distinction should be enough:
>
> * for the superuser install to /usr/lib/common-lisp
> * for non-superusers install to $HOME/.common-lisp
>

Yes, I think Mudballs could do with some rethinking around these
lines, perhaps along with tweaking
the default compilation destination to a ~/.mudballs directory if user
permissions are not sufficient.

I've raised issues on mudballs.redmine.com for both of these.

Cheers,
sean.