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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

Hi, HN! I made this! Ask me any questions you like. I'll try to respond as the workday progresses and I wait for deploys to complete!

paul@nathan.house if you want to email me instead. (or @p_nathan on Twitter, if that's your thing).

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You might want to mention https://github.com/fare/asdf/tree/master/uiop which is part of ASDF and bundled by default with most implementations.

Also, the ASDF information is somewhat dated. It will work, but the central-registry has been deprecated for years. I'm not even sure how it might work on windows.

If you're recommending quicklisp, there's the local-projects approach, otherwise there's $HOME/common-lisp/

Yeah, I need to examine a bit more of the situation with local-projects. I reject ~/common-lisp because I have my own directory structure, thanks. If I can symlink farm under ~/common-lisp, then what's the difference? :)

(and it's not even a hidden directory, so it clutters up ~).

> (and it's not even a hidden directory, so it clutters up ~).

Well in that case you have two options still:

    ~/.local/share/common-lisp/source/

or put config file(s) in:

    ~/.config/common-lisp/source-registry.conf.d/

And keep your lisp source in any arbitrary number of directories.

Of course if the symlink farm is working for you, that's fine; it just has issues (some historic with some implementations doing odd things with TRUENAME, and of course the big one is "windows").

[edit] forgot some other options:

* setting the CL_SOURCE_REGISTRY environment variable

* using one of the newer functions for configuration, particularly with the :tree directive which in many cases removes the need for symlink farms.

I do need to study the matter. I've found the ASDF docs to be unusually opaque (last time I read them), and my current solution to be Very Simple (and a little Stupid), so I've been content not changing the setup.

Thank you for your kind information.

Indeed, I think nearly every section of the chapter on configuration requires you to know the contents of all the other sections for it to make sense. I have probably spent a few hours going over that one chapter at this point...

IMO the "Getting Started" section presents way too many choices. Perhaps instead just link to Portacle (or some other lisp quickstart) with a mention that there are other options?

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