Hi Andreas,
On 07/30/2014 02:51 PM, Andreas Tille wrote:
Hi Ira,
On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 02:43:40PM -0700, Ira Kalet wrote:
Thanks for your continued interest. I actually have some time and
energy to work on this now. Building an executable from source in
Common Lisp is very different from C or other compiled-only
languages. "Make" is not applicable. It will have Lisp
implementation dependencies, so the build for CMUCL will be
different from CLISP and they will yet be different from ACL. Truth
is that right now I only know how to build an executable in ACL but
will look into the others. I will also need to know what the
structure of a Debian package is. I have an old book, "The Debian
System", that should help as an orientation.
Is there a quick tutorial on the Debian packaging mechanism to help
me get started? Might be quicker than reading the book.
We hope to get a good beginner intro (with links to more advanced
packaging documentation) in our Debian Med team policy:
http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/docs/policy.html
Any question about this is very welcome on our mailing list.
Kind regards
Andreas.
Thanks for the reference to the policy and other documents. I now have
a pretty good sense of what is involved.
1. I checked a little further because there are other Common Lisp code
packages in Debian, and I have some installed. It seems that they use
the Common Lisp Controller and asdf (packages common-lisp-controller and
cl-asdf). I have these installed. I already wrote asdf code for SLIK
and can probably do the same for Prism. There is another package,
dh-lisp, that claims to help create Common Lisp based packages. I am
also reading the Common Lisp in Debian manual. It is very helpful but
insufficient.
I think the SLIK library should be a separate package, and the prism
package can then depend on it. Since SLIK is very small (only about 10K
lines of code in 25 or so files, it would be more manageable. Also it
is a library rather than a runnable program. The full prism program is
an extra layer of complexity.
So, obviously, other Debian packages are written in Common Lisp, and I
will take a look to see how they are organized. The one that would be
the most like Prism is the Portable Allegroserve package, cl-aserve.
I'll take a look at that. However, I do not have the resources that the
Lisp hackers at Franz, Inc. do.
2. Which brings me to the next issue. Because of my health issues (I
think I wrote earlier about this - I have advanced metastatic kidney
cancer that has spread to my brain, as well as lungs and abdomen. I
will learn more about the status of the brain mets tomorrow afternoon) I
cannot commit to any long term support, and certainly cannot fulfil the
role of maintainer. I don't know who could do this. There is one
person who might be able to - I will ask him.
3. Finally, there is still the issue of what the US FDA might say about
distribution within the US, as software products that do what Prism does
are considered medical devices and cannot be distributed without FDA
510K premarket approval, an onerous process to be sure. It does not
matter that no money is involved. What do you do about other debian-med
packages? Might any of them be considered a medical device?
Sorry for the long winded email. I will send you an update tomorrow
night about my health status.
--
Ira J. Kalet, Ph.D., FACMI
Professor Emeritus, Radiation Oncology
Professor Emeritus, Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education
Email: [email protected]
Web: http://faculty.washington.edu/ikalet/
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