I realise that posting a wish list for free software is
presumptuous, but here goes anyway...
Have the developers considered creating a standard template/skeleton
for user contributed packages?
It might include
*) a standardised documentation template, for
(mandatory) package docs, and some standard way of incorporating
the docs into a contrib doc tree. Something that would
be easily accessible to writers without hours of study, but
trivially convertible into TeX and HTML (and a lisp-y format? ;)
*) some standard protocol installing the package (eg defsystem, plus
standard locations).
*) a centralised distribution point next to CMUCL itself,
easily accessible to developers (eg, web submissions)
and users.
There is already a contrib directory in the source tree, but
it is small and not terribly useful.
CLOCC is sort of the right idea, but it is not CMUCL-specific (and
much of the interesting stuff would be CMUCL-specific FFI
bindings). Also CLOCC places too little emphasis on docs,
and seems to be a centralised whole rather a bunch of
independent packages.
I'm asking this because I have some things that others might want, like
higher level sockets, SSL, an async dns library, etc, but no real easy
way to distribute. And I'm sure that others in a similar situation
have stuff I might want. The things in the CMUCL ports collection are
scattered all around the net, with few docs, and little
standardisation.
Is this a nutty idea?
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