[CM] Re: cannot run cm script on Linux SBCL

[Christophe Rhodes]

"M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@cesmail.net> writes:

> Bill, Fernando, Rick -- are you on the SBCL list? I dropped off before I 
> went on vacation and haven't gone back yet. I'm pretty sure they care as 
> much about being able to run the CCRMA software as they do about, say, 
> MAXIMA. Algorithmic composition is an important application in the Lisp 
> world. It's not just CCRMA -- David Cope and a few others also choose to 
> work in Lisp.

</lurk>

We care, in as much as a bunch of volunteers can care about anything
outside what counts as "fun"...

There is a bug in sbcl 0.9.3 such that attempts to run in an "invalid"
locale (more on which later) don't recover gracefully but instead die
horribly with an uninformative error message.  It may be that that's
the cause of your problems; if it is, running sbcl with e.g.
  $ LANG=C sbcl
stands a chance of fixing it.  (Also, the version in HEAD CVS might
fix it).

"Invalid" here doesn't mean anything as straigtforward as invalid,
though -- it means those for which nl_langinfo(CODESET) returns a
string describing the character encoding which we haven't yet
implemented support for (at present, we have support for ASCII,
Latin-1, UTF-8, Latin-9, a few Russian encodings).  If a particular
codeset is important to you, we can at least point you to how to
implement support for it, and possibly implement it ourselves.

In general, we SBCL types do want to make using it not horrendously
painful; this is balanced at the moment by the sub-1.0 version number
-- we don't yet commit to stability of interfaces.  In particular, I
believe this has caused pain from the callback side of things; all I
can suggest there (because that kind of thing is well outside my
personal expertise) is that you (the cmdist people) talk to the sbcl
people about what you need -- because it's a lot easier to get
motivated about implementing something tricky if you know someone will
use it (and ideally will give feedback over whether it's good or not
:-)

(It's many years since I worked with CM or satellite technologies -- I
used CMN a little at one point -- but I am still at least partly a
musician, as well as a lisp programmer, and I try to welcome users of
the bits of software I'm responsible for.  It is true to say that I
don't have a large amount of time to devote purely to making SBCL
better for users, and nor does anyone I know of on the SBCL
development team; I can quite understand frustrations when things go
wrong, and can only apologise.  Sorry.)

<lurk>

Cheers,

Christophe