[Gardeners] A batteries package for Common Lisp?

[Maciek Pasternacki]

On Setting Orange, The Aftermath 53, 3172 YOLD, Gary King wrote:

> The goal of including the batteries with Lisp is a very good one, and  
> perennial. Cf. Peter Seibel's Lispbox, Edi Weitz's (I forget what it  
> is called), packages like CL-Utilities, Drew Crampsie's and Marco  
> Baringer's project (again, the name escapes me) and my own extremely  
> moribund Enterprise Lisp.

I won't say for OP, but I wasn't thinking about Yet Another
Lisp+batteries Project.  Rather about separate batteries package (or,
actually, meta-package).  Might require ASDF and probably
ADSF-Install, or might be based on something like
http://japhy.fnord.org/LocalAsdfInstall and requiring only (load
"path/to/load.lisp") to have battery pack at your fingertips ;)

> The real problem, I think, is not the software, it's the community.  
> Lisp has a great community (though some would disagree). However,  
> CLers seem more likely to build their own batteries (or cold fusion  
> nuclear power plants!) than look for existing ones whereas other  
> languages (e.g., Python, Ruby, etc) seem to promote a garden more  
> easily. IMHO, the desire for a garden and for batteries is there but  
> the mechanism hasn't appeared yet.

I see this as starting contents for ASDF+ASDF-install's site/ and
systems/ dir, that would make a framework for further tinkering,
installing more libraries, upgrading, making snapshot of current state
(think `my own batteries' tarball that would be CL-Batteries add-on
with libraries I use), etc., etc.  This way, it won't be useful only
as side wheels for newbies ;)

-- 
__    Maciek Pasternacki <maciekp at japhy.fnord.org> [ http://japhy.fnord.org/ ]
`| _   |_\  / { ...to keep from dying is not the same as ``to live''. }
,|{-}|}| }\/
\/   |____/                                            ( Frank Herbert )  -><-