Comments on: Adventures in Package Dependencies

By: Boba

Boba — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:48:01 +0000

*whistles* I’ve fought that sort of thing in the past, too. Of course, the difficulty varies with platform (SBCL, OpenMCL, ECL) (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OS X). I even once had to manually (normally, I use ASDF-INSTALL) chase down all the dependencies for Hunchentoot. But, I don’t recall even that being quite as nested and crazy as what you’re doing here.

You may feel defeated, but hey, you stuck it out (far) longer than I would have lasted.

By: Vitaly

Vitaly — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:28:59 +0000

Did you know darcs needs the GNU Multi-precision Library? I’m assuming it uses its own hashing functions that want big integers or something, but I wasn’t really expecting all of that.

Darcs requires libgmp through ghc (it is written in Haskell).

By: pat

pat — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:17:21 +0000

If I want to use Zach's PNG library on some platform, I hop into Lisp and ASDF-Install ZPNG. If I want to use the FFI CL-PNG, then I hop into Lisp and ASDF-Install CL-PNG only to find that I need libpng. Then, I scramble around the net to find libpng. I figure out how to compile libpng only to discover that I need zlib. I track down zlib, compile and install it. Then, I go back into Lisp and try again to ASDF-Install CL-PNG. I'm not saying it's particularly FFI's fault or ASDF-Install's fault that neither can track down foreign software and build it. I'm just saying that I far prefer when things just work.

By: Cyrus Harmon

Cyrus Harmon — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:30:31 +0000

Right, and the new version has all that stuff built into it. You only need those special forms for loading fftw-ffi-gen. fftw-ffi should asdf-load out of the box now. if it doesn’t that’s a bug.

This is really a problem of some poor design decisions on my part made long ago, coupled with some unneeded dependencies. Fix those design decisions, as I had done in my other gcc-xml-ffi-using libraries, and fix the bogus dependencies and the problem goes away.

I certainly accept and appreciate your criticisms of the fftw-ffi library, but they were fixable problems with my particular implementation. While the problems were many, they hardly justify an indictment of the entire approach to utilizing functionality that isn’t written in lisp.

By: ivan

ivan — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:44:27 +0000

unfortunately too many lisp programmers “release” broken/undocumented code.
i say “release” because a big percentage of them don’t even bother with that.
‘Get it straight outta cvs’ they say. Lack of docs is not unique to lisp, lots of opensource projects suffer from it too. The rest however is stupidly unique to lisp. People don’t bother making proper releases, they still haven’t implemented a good app for software distribution and installation (clbuild: only in lisp land could such an atrocity that pulls everything from VCS be regarded as a solution) and if this wasn’t enough, there are horrible dependency chains that you have to deal with. i work around that by not using anything that i can’t install with asdf-install. if i have to waste time in order to look for library dependencies, deal with bleeding edge VCS code, try to figure out how something works without docs, then it is not going to be used by me.

By: pat

pat — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:19:05 +0000

I don’t think that’s my problem. I think it’s that ASDF doesn’t know what to do with the special forms you have in the defsystem that relate to turning the XML into something useable by Lisp.

By: Cyrus Harmon

Cyrus Harmon — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:04:56 +0000

Pat, there is a new version of fftw-ffi that doesn't require gcc-xml-ffi (or anything else for that matter), other than fftw3. You can find it at: http://git.cyrusharmon.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=fftw-ffi.git;a=summary If you want to regenerate the ffi glue, you can use a more current gcc-xml-ffi (found on the above git repo) and asdf load fftw-ffi-gen and it should recreate the bindings.

By: pat

pat — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:27:51 +0000

And, I did end up downloading your binary. I forgot that Darcs was Haskell. Interesting.

By: Scott Bell

Scott Bell — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:56:09 +0000

The GHC runtime uses GMP (as of the latest released version) for bignum support. There is a GMP-free option in the next (6.12) release. The darcs binaries that I build for OS X (available on darcs.net) link libgmp statically, so you can simply put the binary in your path and away you go.

- Scott

By: pat

pat — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:34:45 +0000

Well, if you’re interested in trying to track down what’s what. I’d say the biggest problem is that your packages have a bunch of dependencies. Every step I took, I found one more package I needed first. ASDF-Install couldn’t find them, so I had to track each one down with Google.

I might have gotten away with only a third of the dependencies if things failed gracefully when the docs won’t build.

The big problem with FFTW-FFI itself was getting the gccxml portion of the ASD file going.

I should also say that I’ve run into this dependency chasing with various other people’s packages in the past. And, I’ve run into similar situations with C libraries and Java libraries, too. It’s not just you. And, it’s not just Lisp.