In v0, Emacs with SLIME. This is not the best possible, but our long-term preference (an Emacs-like editor in CL) is unlikely to be ready in the same kind of timeframe as the rest of v0
Status: asdf is considered pretty stable. It's bundled with SBCL and has a texinfo manual
asdf-install is a lot younger. It needs more work to cope with version dependencies, upgrades, and package removal, and also we need to sort out the trust issues as we can't reasonably expect everyone to have GPG keys signed by Debian developers. (Use a single cirCLe key to sign all packages, or to sign all "approved" cirCLe developers.)
Some thoughts on versioning: To teach asdf-install about versions first asdf needs to know about them (in a more consistent manner then it does now), and packagers need to maintain a versioning discipline of some sort. Iinitially we won't cater for multiple versions in the same image, but being able to do :depends-on ((:foo 2 4)) or :depends-on (:foo-2.4), and having a sane ruleset about "which version satisfies this dependency" would be a win.
cirCLe documentation will be produced using texinfo, on the pragmatic grounds that (i) it's a mature technology, (ii) it's easy to learn, (iii) it has commands for documenting Lisp - as opposed to, say, DocBook, which is tailored to static languages, (iv) there's a dpANS to texinfo convertor available (see below).
We need to work on the documentation toolchain: requirements are to be able to produce output suitable for publishing on the Web, printed output, and some format which can be integrated into the development environment for online help (e.g. editor hotkey for "look up symbol at cursor position")
Status:
makeinfo can apparently output some form of XML if pressed, so it would be possible in future to do interesting programmatic transformations on our documents when it occurs to us what they might be.
Getting Started/downloading/installation guide: this is Daniel's first priority after he's done with metawork.
Coding standards : Robert Strandh is working on this, and posts drafts on circle-devel for review. Might end up being separated into general Lisp style guide and a cirCLe-specific document covering things like asdf and licensing.
CL Language reference : We need a free version of the ANSI standard or functional equivalent - something similar to the Hyperspec, which we cannot distribute legally. This will involve starting from the ANSI final draft TeX sources and transforming them into some hyperlinked format. Note that GCL seems to have done something similar for their info documentation. Status: not done, nobody is working on it. Perhaps there are other free Lisp implementations who'd be interested in helping? Whoever picks this up might want to look at http://www.phys.au.dk/~harder/dpans.html which converts the dpANS text into Texinfo Or maybe it would be easier to help the GCL people improve the existing texinfo manual?
CLX : CLX exists and works. There may be things that can be done to it functionally (threading cleanups come to mind), but they're not believed to be showstoppers. It comes with a manual in texinfo form, although we haven't yet got useful editor integration goo for it.
Alan Crowe (I think) also wrote some CLX example/tutorial documents, which we should see if we can include. (They are at simple examples - Alan)
McCLIM : mostly complete, mostly fast enough to be usable (though reportedly a lot faster on some other Lisp implementations: if someone wants an optimization project, we'd really like to know why). We'd like to feature Andy's Listener much more heavily than we're currently able to: it needs SBCL support for a debugger, speed improvements, and convenience features such as history editing with cursor keys. Upstream need working on to create their tarballs in asdf-installable format
OpenGL Bindings : various of these are floating around the net, but I don't know much about any of them. Someone volunteer, investigate, package.
GNOME/KDE support: this is mostly a wishlist item right now. Some degree of GNOME (and Glade) support exists in the shape of cl-gtk and clg, but KDE is more problematical due to its C++-centricity. We would probably want these to be implemented as McCLIM backends.
Socket-level interfacing (TCP, UDP, etc) is covered by SB-BSD-SOCKETS, which comes with SBCL.
HTTP : We have a choice of web servers in the shape of Araneida or Portable Allegroserve (I am personally attached to Araneida, so I would like someone else to rationally validate the decision I have emotionally made already). It would be useful to have a more general HTTP library that could be used for both clients and servers, as well as a URL parser.
Pg, CLSQL. Pg works right now, is already asdf-installable, and is used actively with SBCL, so I'm inclined to recommend it for the immediate term. CLSQL implements the CommonSQL interface and is genreally a much more comprehensive solution: someone needs to check how close to asdf-installability it is
CL-PPCRE (regex support) and xmls (XML) are both asdf-installable, so ready as far as the current standards go.
The number of asdf-installable libraries is growing all the time. Given that cirCLe is currently a fairly loose (and small) collection of people, the hope is that rather than us going out and searching for stuff, we provide incentives for upstream packagers to package their programs directly for us (many have already started using asdf-install), and then all we need do is decide what to recommend.
Note to self: avoid doing the "choice paralysis" thing
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