Hi all,

Just had a thought. asdf-install currently obtains a link to what it
needs to download via cliki. It is common now for most software to be
obtained via a (often distributed) version control repository. How
about if we add the paths to the relevant repos on the cliki page too,
just like the current tag for tarballs:

:(package "http://...url...")

I'm not sure what an appropriate syntax would be, or if we need to
modify cliki, but some agreement between producer and consumer of this
data would be nice (but not required, indeed, I have no idea what to
do with this yet). I'm sure the uses will come: there're a whole host
of module/build/dependency-tracker etc programs that are incubating in
the Lisp world today...

How about one of more of the following tags, to be used in parallel
with :(package "..."), eg:

:(darcs "http://...url...")

darcs git hg cvs svn bzr arch(or tla?)

A consumer for this data would then need to know the appropriate
version control commands, eg "darcs get", or "git clone", etc.

I don't really know of a nice way to automate this as yet, but that
could probably help too... an automatic or semi-automatic (with manual
oversight) way sounds most promising.

I would suggest that you talk to the clbuild folks and see what they
say on how they could use this information best.

Thanks for proposing this,

What about versions too?  

(:version "1.0" :package "ftp://lisp.com/packages/my-package-1.0.tar.bz")
(:version "1.1" :package "ftp://lisp.com/packages/my-package-1.111.tar.bz")

So we could also map versions to 'tags' for repositories:

(:version "1.0" :darcs "1_0")
(:version "1.1" :darcs "1_1_good")

Tamas, Thanks for the hint on clbuild. I have never really used it in
fact. Pascal B's idea for versioning info sounds like there'll need to
be a (laborious?) change to the cliki page every time something is
released. I'm beginning to think cliki might not be the right place
for this? Not sure...

I've had a quick looked into cliki. In the sandbox eg, trying new tags
result in errors (unsupported):

[unrecognised GIT keyword occurred here: args
("http://repo.or.cz/w/cl-zmq.git")] [unrecognised VERSION keyword
occurred here: args ("1.0" "some-git-tag")]

[unrecognised RANDOM keyword occurred here: args ("test")]

This is because only certain keywords are allowed. They are
eql specialised by html-for-keyword (cliki's view.lisp):

(defmethod html-for-keyword ((cliki cliki-view) stream
                             (keyword (eql :package))
                             &rest args)
  ...)

(defmethod html-for-keyword ((cliki cliki-view) stream
                             (keyword (eql :download))
                             &rest args)
  (destructuring-bind (name &key (from :unknown) &allow-other-keys)
args
    (html-for-download-link cliki stream from name)))

All in all, in view.lisp, there are 9 possible keywords defined:

:error :topic :link :legacy-
search :search :clhs :cclan :download :package

I'm not sure what the status of cliki (the code) is unfortunately.

Description of url links should probably NOT be hard coded absolute
paths, since there may be different protocol types, (git://, http://,
https://, darcs://, ssh://, ftp://? etc), relative links, and mirrors,
so a first class URL representation (a bit like pathnames, but one
that doesn't suck) might be best? Best to be PRINT-able and READ-able
too.

Directory information, I've found quite a few isolated/distributed
mirrors or repositories:

loliveira's darcs mirror at
http://common-lisp.net/~loliveira/ediware/

A similar clbuild's darcs mirror at
http://common-lisp.net/project/clbuild/mirror/

common-lisp.net mirror at (git only? (for now?))
http://common-lisp.net/project/mirror/git/

clbuild's wnpp-projects

Git public mirrors or repos

http://repo.or.cz/w?by_tag=lisp

http://github.com/languages/Common%20Lisp/updated

Other methods, harder to extract urls:

Various Gentoo mirror examples. Grepping shell scripts? Uggh
http://mirror.qubenet.net/mirror/gentoo-portage/dev-lisp/
http://ftp.rz.tu-bs.de/pub/mirror/ftp.gentoo.org/gentoo-x86-portage/d...

Crawl common-lisp.net itself
http://common-lisp.net/projects.shtml

Does anyone have any more links to add to this list?

I'm not sure what I wanted to do really, just randomly exploring at
this stage, so please bear with me :)

PS:
Additional note:

Also, there is a typo in the default path for merging :package

:(package "cliki.tar.gz") => http://ww.telent.net/cclan/cliki.tar.gz

Adding source code control support to cliki/asdf-install was something I
thought about a bit a few years ago, but I'm told that clbuild has more
or less overtaken it these days anyway.