Preliminary Debian packaging for Clozure Common Lisp (ccl.clozure.com)

[Faheem Mitha]

Hi Christoph,

Thank you for your response. Feedback from members of Debian's Common Lisp 
team is always helpful.

On Tue, 14 Aug 2012, Christoph Egger wrote:

> Hi!
>
>  Please Send any mail also directly to me if you're interested in my
> Input as I'm not reading -mentors regularly and pkg-common-lisp-devel@
> is -- it appears -- not getting enough of my attention to see your
> messages in time.

Ok, I'll do that.

> Faheem Mitha <faheem at faheem.info> writes:
>> 1) I'd like to take over the outstanding ITP for CCL (#609047,
>> cc'd). I've written to Darren Ho, the creator of this ITP, on 1st July
>> 2012, (see http://bugs.debian.org/609047), but have not yet received a
>> reply. What else do I need to do, if anything?
>
>  Send a mail to the bug report explaining that you'll take over and set
> yourself as the owner of the bug.

Done.

>> I guess I need to get a sponsor at some point. When should this happen?
>
>  It needs to be done once you have a package ready on mentors.debian.net

Ok. I should be able to upload to mentors soon.

>> 2) The main outstanding issue is how to handle the bootstrapping
>> issue, namely that CCL is not in Debian, but requires CCL to compile.
>
>  For sbcl I do bootstrapping with a crossbuild from another
> architecture .. building just a non-packaged version and using that to
> bring up the package. Once there is a version in the archive everything
> works automatically. So ideally I can build the first package with a
> locally installed ccl (e.g. in /usr/local/bin, ..). sbcl's debian/rules
> has some magic now to do this (and the last commit is totally messed up
> :-(

Could one just use upstream binaries instead? CCL has upstream binaries 
available, which I use to initially build my Debian package, for at least 
i386 and amd64. My package currently does not attempt to build on any 
other architecture, because I can't test it.

>  I guess bootstrapping only needs to be done once and later versions of
> ccl can be built using the version that is then included in Debian?

Well this is precisely my question to the CCL developers. So far, I have 
not got a response. See the thread 
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.openmcl.devel/8046

I'm copied you on my most recent message to that thread. If you don't want 
me to CC you, let me know.

>> 3) My current package description for the package is
>> 4) Debian requires a copyright statement, which is located in the
>> "copyright" file in the repository. On installation it is installed in
>> /usr/share/doc/pkgname/copyright. Here is the current text, taken from
>> the openmcl package that was in Debian a few years ago.

>> ###################################################################
>> OpenMCL is licensed under ...
> CCL?
>> ####################################################################

I've fixed that. Thanks.

As mentioned elsewhere, my Debian CCL packaging is at 
https://bitbucket.org/faheem/ccl-debian

You may want to glance at 
https://bitbucket.org/faheem/ccl-debian/src/tip/README.source which goes 
into some detail about my current build strategy.

                                                          Regards, Faheem