Suddenly having trouble with update-dao

[Zach Beane]

Ralf Mattes <rm at seid-online.de> writes:

> On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 11:22:53AM -0500, Zach Beane wrote:
>> 
>> It does use arbitrary checkouts for many projects. There are many useful
>> projects for which that is the only way the software is made available.
>> 
>> Most of the time it works ok, but sometimes it doesn't. I'd like to
>> improve the situation, but it takes time.
>
> I see. 
> So, is there a way to install a specific quicklisp dist? 

http://blog.quicklisp.org/2011/08/going-back-in-dist-time.html describes
the current process. It can only be done after the initial install.
 
As it happens, in the next day or two I am going to update the
initial install process to make it easy to install a specific dist by
URL during installation rather than afterwards. 

This will extend to the Quicklisp software itself (i.e. asdf and the
code that fetches and loads library code). The goal is to make it easy
to have a stable, reproducible Quicklisp configuration.

> My buildscript currently uses the following:
>
>   sbcl --non-interactive --no-userinit --load quicklisp.lisp 
>   --eval "(quicklisp-quickstart:install :path (merge-pathnames \"quicklisp/\" (directory-namestring (truename *default-pathname-defaults*))))"
>
> But this seems to fetch the current quicklisp dist.
> And, related: how long do you provide older versions of the dist?

I hope to provide them indefinitely. The cost for Amazon storage for
Quicklisp is very low, currently around $5/month.

> Thanks for all that work - by using quicklisp I was able to drop
> thew need to create Debian wrappers for 12 lisp packages.

Glad to hear it.

(Further discussion should probably go to quicklisp at googlegroups.com
instead.)

Zach