Sebastian, I looked at your swiQlisp tool and found it to be working just fine for me. I have the following comments about it in order to move forward the discussion.
First, I must confess that I'm not comfortable with resorting to create a special user to serve as the owner of quicklisp-installed files. Given that the justification you indicated for this is that running the quicklisp-install script as root would deploy the files to the wrong directory, I looked a little further into this and luckily found that it already supports an optional parameter to specify the location where it is desired to install quicklisp. I created a patch[1] to your swiqlisp-install script that takes advantage of this parameter and perform the install to the same directory as your original version, but without resorting to create the special user account. Second, I found the "swi" prefix a puzzling for a few minutes at first, and then realized it meant "system wide install". I think the prefix can be dropped for the most part: installation directory can be /usr/share/common-lisp/quicklisp, user callable shell script could be simply named /usr/bin/quicklisp, and so on. Finally, I've been trying to figure out how to approach the interaction between SWI-quicklisp and other systems not controlled by it (e.g. a user-level quicklisp installed the standard way, as well as other systems for which Debian packages have been created and installed via dpkg). The easy case is when a user-level quicklisp installation is performed as usual, because it seems to me that the expectation from the user would clearly be that this intstallation would take precedence over any systems installed by the sysadmin. I don't think we need to do anything special (ASDF2 already supports this scheme of giving higher priority to user-specific systems search paths). But I've not found it so clear what the rules should be for clarifying interaction of quicklisp-managed and dpkg-managed systems. I would think it indisputable that quicklisp-managed systems would be more abundant and up-to-date than dpkg-managed ones. Following a logic similar as to why the user would like to have the option to install selected systems by himself (e.g. to have available packages not installed by the sysadmin, or to use/test newer versions than those sanctioned by IT dep.), I would say that quicklisp-managed systems would take precedence over dpkg-managed ones. On the other hand, dpkg-managed systems would likely be better tailored/configured out-of-the-box than quicklisp-managed ones. And I would think that if a system available via quicklisp is also debianized, it's because there's a real need to take pains to do so. I'm thinking on systems with non-Lisp dependencies, like the CL-SQL backends that require specific libraries to be installed in the system to actually work. Thus, it could be argued that, if there´s ever a dpkg-managed system installed along with other quicklisp-managed systems, the the former (*and all its dpkg-managed dependencies*) should take precedence over the later ones. At this point, I can't help thinking in subtle interactions by divergent versions of base systems in a single installation, but perhaps now I'm splitting hairs. So, if simplicity is to save us from muddling with too much minutiae, then I say that the sane overriding rule would be to state that any quicklisp-managed system always takes precedence over traditional dpkg-managed ones. Anyone disagrees? Cheers, -- Paulo [1] === BEGIN swiqlisp-install.patch === diff --git a/swiqlisp-install b/swiqlisp-install index 6784333..06de2dc 100755 --- a/swiqlisp-install +++ b/swiqlisp-install @@ -27,7 +27,6 @@ source swiqlisp.rc source swiqlisp-utils -SWIQLISP_INSTALL='$SU -c "$INVOC $COMMANDS" $SYSUSR' LISP=$1 # argument sanity checks @@ -45,8 +44,7 @@ if test ! -x "$LISP"; then fi # create system user (suppressing the warning emitted if user exists) -adduser --quiet --system --home $SYSUSR_HOME \ - --shell /bin/sh --disabled-login $SYSUSR +mkdir -p $SYSUSR_HOME # check for system user home if test ! -d $SYSUSR_HOME; then @@ -120,10 +118,10 @@ mkdir -p installed-systems # install Quicklisp LOAD="quicklisp.lisp" -EVAL="'(quicklisp-quickstart:install)'" +EVAL="(quicklisp-quickstart:install :path \\\"$SYSUSR_HOME/\\\")" ERRLOG="/tmp/swiqlisp-setup_error.log" -COMMANDS="$load $LOAD $eval $EVAL $quit 2>$ERRLOG" -eval $SWIQLISP_INSTALL +COMMANDS="$load $LOAD $eval \"$EVAL\" $quit 2>$ERRLOG" +eval $INVOC $COMMANDS # check for errors if test -s $ERRLOG; then === END swiqlisp-install.patch === _______________________________________________ pkg-common-lisp-devel mailing list pkg-common-lisp-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pkg-common-lisp-devel
