Date: Wed, 22 May 2013 14:29:22 +0200
Quote:
- Zach's Journal
A followup from Anton
http://xach.livejournal.com/313452.html
Text:
From: Anton Vodonosov <avodonosov@yandex.ru> Subject: Re: combining load failures with dependencies information to priorities fixes Xach, could you please arrange the following clarification to be forwarded to Planet Lisp? It's necessary in particular to restore/confirm good names of ECL and Closer to MOP? When I posted the first message in this thread and CC'ed Xach, I wanted to present the results cl-test-grid may provide, but I forgot that the results deal with failures, and without proper explanation it may cast shadow of bad impression onto someone's hard work. In this case ECL and Closer to MOP were mentioned in context of large table of failures. First of all. The absolute minority of the compile-load failures presented in the report are bugs in ECL (if any). The failures may be classified by their cause into: - CL implementation bugs - library bugs - library intentionally supports only limited set of CL implementations - absence of certain foreign library on the test system. By priority for the lisp implementation maintainer: 1. CL implementation bugs are of course of interest for the maintainer. Here I want to say how they are handled in ECL. Of course, ECL can not be bug free, especially taken into account that in the recent years it saw major changes (fully rewritten Lisp-to-C compiler, newly introduced bytecode compiler, refactoring of multi-threading infrastructure, performance improvements and lot of other improvements). But when critical bugs are found, they are usually fixed very quickly. This demonstrates the great level of control Juan Jose has on the ECL code base. 2. Bugs in basic widely used libraries as alexandria; portability layers like closer-mop, usocket, bordeaux-threads; important libraries as hunchentoot or drakma. This is not the area of direct "responsibility" for the CL implementation developer who didn't started the project and didn't make a commitment to support it. I put "responsibility" into quotes because very often we deal with open source projects, which are provided AS IS. No-one is obliged to provide support. The applies also to the library author. Of course, CL implementation developer might be interested to support such important libraries to achieve wider adoption of his CL implementation. The library author is also usually interested. And the users of the library, who want to develop applications on the given CL implementation are also interested to see the library fixed on this CL implementation. So, this is an area where interest of various parties overlaps and we may hope the issue will be fixed (depending the time available for these parties and presence of necessary knowledge). Speaking particularly about Closer to MOP on ECL. ECL has improved MOP support recently, but the API changes are not backward compatible. According to the Pascal's comment in his blog, now Closer to MOP will need a lot less code to support ECL. But migration to the new API will take some development time. 3. Compile/load failures which do not need to be fixed. For a library developer it is often the only possible or at least the most reasonable solution to support limited set of CL implementations, because supporting and testing on every CL requires more time than available. If there is a library named "my-html-utils" which is only used by "my-web-application" and the library author works with one particular CL implementation, there is no need to bother neither the library author, nor other community members with requests to port the library onto other CL implementations. What we can do is to collect and provide information about what works where, and the author will decide himself. Or maybe the first user, who whats to employ the library on a different implementation will port it. I assume that the failures in the category 3 might constitute the majority of all the failures. 4. Absence of foreign library on the test system. I plan to adjust cl-test-grid agent in the future so that CFFI errors will be recognized and stored as a special status, so that we will be able to exclude them from report + maybe collect the list of foreign libraries used by whole Quicklisp. But it's not the highest priority, the reports in the current form allow to make lot of useful conclusions. That's it. I hope it clarifies any doubts about the quality of work done by ECL and Closer to MOP developers. And also on my intentions. I don't call the developers to spend even more of their time. Other way around. We should anticipate the fact that developers time is very limited. If we all be realistic and stay within limits of possible the results will be more satisfying. I hope that presence of information will allow to save developers energy by helping them to choose areas where the efforts will give maximum outcome; to decide also what may be avoided. The load failures + dependencies report was build for ECL first because it was Juan Jose's proposal to combine them together to prioritize problems. I've just published similar reports for some other CL implementations I have: http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/abcl-load-failures.html http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/acl-load-failures.html http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/ccl-load-failures.html http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/cmucl-load-failures.html http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/sbcl-load-failures.html http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/ecl-load-failures.html Best regards, - Anton
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