swiQlisp — site-wide Quicklisp

Tools for installing Quicklisp site-wide and then managing that installation (using a lisp implementation of your choice).

Works by creating an unprivileged system user (default swiqlisp) whose home directory is in a site-wide location (default /usr/share/common-lisp/swiqlisp) and then running lisp as that system user. Symbolic links pointing to system definition files are gathered together under a single directory; ~swiqlisp/installed-systems/.

Unprivileged users can then use ASDF:LOAD-SYSTEM to load these site-wide installed Quicklisp libraries by simply adding ~swiqlisp/installed-systems/ to their ASDF:*CENTRAL-REGISTRY*. To assist with this last step, the system administrator is asked whether or not she would like to add a stanza to the site-wide lisp initialisation file (e.g. /etc/sbclrc) to this effect when installing swiQlisp.

Installation

$ sudo ./swiqlisp-install

Usage

$ swiqlisp -h
[sudo] swiqlisp <query-or-action> [<object>] [<lisp>]

Queries don't require root privileges. Actions do.

Queries implemented so far:
 releases
 systems
 release-systems
 system-apropos
 depends
 versions

Actions implemented so far:
 install
 install-no-compile
 uninstall
 update-systems
 downdate-systems
 self-update
 refresh-system-links

Lisp defaults to 'sbcl', currently the only lisp supported.

swiQlisp SLIME usage

swank is the name of the Common Lisp component of SLIME (the Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs) the rest of which is written in Emacs Lisp. For this reason, SLIME is called swank in Quicklisp (since Quicklisp is a Common Lisp library manager, not an Emacs Lisp library manager) so first of all you must install the Quicklisp packageswank:

$ sudo swiqlisp install swank

Do not install the package quicklisp-slime-helper. It assumes Quicklisp is installed under your home directory and will not work as expected.

Then add the following line:

 (load (expand-file-name "~swiqlisp/swiqlisp-slime-helper.el"))

to your ~/.emacs init file (and remove any existing Quicklisp SLIME configuration).

Finally, restart Emacs and you should be good to go.

Uninstallation

Installation includes an uninstallation script /usr/bin/swiqlisp-uninstall so to uninstall swiQlisp, simply run the script:

$ swiqlisp-uninstall

If you confirm your decision, swiQlisp and all Quicklisp systems installed by swiQlisp will be removed and the unprivileged system user swiqlisp will be deleted.

TODO

• Improve install script so that it leaves an existing Quicklisp untouched but updates all swiQlisp files.

• Fix non-privileged queries.

• Work out precisely why, with a fresh swiqlisp, 'install' hunchentoot says that "30 newly installed systems are now availiable" but if you then run 'systems' you'll see that 35 systems are in fact installed.

• Invocations for lisps other than SBCL.

• Package collections.