Assorted brush clearing.

Adding additional libraries to a clbuild setup is easy. Just add lines to your wnpp-projects file. For example:

cl-json get_darcs http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-json/darcs/cl-json

Give it a try and add additional things until everything you need is included. I’ll admit to editing the dependencies file by hand.

Sooner or later you get to things for which this doesn’t work. You can teach clbuild about additional projects by just adding them to the source directory and then using the register-asd command on that project. Given that your stuck doing that you will need to tell clbuild not to attempt to download them. You the command called skip marks the project to prevent any attempt to download.

That scenario arises if you want to use cl-xmpp, which depends on cl-sasl. Cl-sasl uses yet another source control system, GNU arch, which clbuild doesn’t handle yet. Clbuild is really pretty awesome at dealing with the excessive diversity of source control systems members of the Lisp community have embraced. We do love our exceptions.

I did try using get_tarball, which is deprecated, but that didn’t work out. Possibly because the tarball filename is cl-sasl_0.3; and that code appears to want it to be cl-sasl. I didn’t look further.

Cl-xmpp did not work, out of the box, with my ejabberd. That problem appears to be explained in this archive of the development mailing list. The resolution involves passing :mechanism :sasl-digest-md5 to xmpp:auth, but it also requires a patch to ejabberd to improve it’s xml conformance. I haven’t made the ejabberd patch yet, or maybe I need to upgrade ejabberd.

Ben Laurie recently observed “people don’t really talk much about the experience of writing and debugging code.” I suspect if that void were filled we would see many dull postings like the above; or more likely postings like the ones Jason S. Cornez makes in the archive above.

This posting is, in part, triggered by Ben’s comment. But it’s also provides a checkpoint. I need to context switch to other activities at this point. I certainly didn’t expect to devote quite so much time to this when I added this to my wnpp-projects file Saturday afternoon.

cl-xmpp get_cvs_clnet

Update: ejabberd is probably doing the right thing (see here)… Hm, looks like the code forked and a better version is to be had as so:

cl-xmpp get_git http://www.lichteblau.com/git/cl-xmpp.git/

Maybe I should always read the entire transcript of the development mailing list before I start anything.