Steeldump_BETA

Steeldump is an unofficial APT repository for applications written in Common Lisp.

Steeldump provides binary packages based on SBCL.
It uses sb-heapdump as the binary format.
The focus is on end-user applications, with libraries being pulled in only as necessary.
Currently only for x86 (built by David Lichteblau on Debian testing).

All packages included are assumed to be Free Software under various different licenses. No warranty whatsoever can be provided for Steeldump. "Now fear, comprehensively."

News

2006-05-dd

bla

Installation

Add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.lisp, then run aptitude update.

deb http://www.lichteblau.com/blubba/steeldump unstable main

Packages are all named steeldump-foo. E.g., to install climacs, type aptitude install steeldump-climacs. All packages install exclusively to /opt/steeldump and do not interact with the "normal" Lisp packages included in Debian at all.

There are no source code packages, but full source code is included in each binary package. (Except for SBCL itself, which is packaged as steeldump-sbcl with source code only for the contribs, as usual.)

Usage

Binaries (for the applications) can be found in /opt/steeldump/bin.
SBCL can be started manually using /opt/steeldump/bin/sbcl.
(Make sure that $SBCL_HOME is not set incorrectly when doing so. A correct setting for this variable would be /opt/steeldump/lib/sbcl, but that value is already compiled into the SBCL binary, so it is not necessary to override it.)
bin/sbcl loads user init files (~/.sbclrc). The application scripts do not.
To load heapdumped systems at the Lisp REPL manually, use (require :foo).
It is possible to use ASDF's load-op instead, although that just ends up calling require through a trampoline system. Once the heap file has been loaded, however, a real asdf system object takes charge.
Implementation detail: To save a little space, source code is installed without fasls. Instead, the fasls are replaced with (essentially) empty files that just have the correct timestamp to make ASDF come to the conclusion that it has nothing to do.

How to report problems

If you encounter something you think is a bug, please try to find out whether the problem lies with steeldump or with the upstream application/library.

If you believe steeldump is to blame, please send bug reports to steeldump-devel@common-lisp.net to avoid pestering upstream maintainers with problems they cannot know anything about. If possible, please include a patch. See below for instructions on the steeldump scripts.

If, however, the bug is also present is the upstream source code, please send your report directly to the upstream project. Thanks.

Building Steeldump

(You can skip this section if you just want to use steeldump packages normally. See above for installation instructions.)

To help debugging or developing Steeldump, the following steps should be enough to build your own steeldump packages:

Set up a chroot environment or virtual machine to compile steeldump in.

If you really do not want to do this, keep this in mind: Steeldump must be compiled in the exact same location where it is going to be installed into, /opt/steeldump. So you cannot run the steeldump scripts in a filesystem where steeldump packages are already installed.

Although it does not address safety issues, you can obviously build a mock-up chroot very easily using mount -o bind, so this should not be too much of an issue.
Create a new directory /opt/steeldump. In the build environment, this directory should be owned by a non-root user. (The build scripts will only run sudo briefly for each package to fix file ownership before packaging the files up. Building should be done normally under your non-root account.)

Check out the steeldump scripts from Subversion:

$ cd /opt/steeldump 
$ svn co http://foobar/trunk/scripts

Run the first script:
```
/opt/steeldump$ ./scripts/init
```
-- or just look at what it does. It merely creates a few directories and checks whether required software is installed. CMUCL is used for building (you can use the debian-provided cmucl package), and dpkg-dev tools as well as sudo are needed.

The first package you need to download and build is SBCL:

$ ./scripts/fetch-sbcl
$ ./scripts/build-sbcl
$ ./scripts/makedeb-sbcl

Congratulations: If that worked, you have your first .deb package in /opt/steeldump/pool.

Now you can build the actual steeldumped applications using the same steps:
```
$ ./scripts/fetch-all
$ ./scripts/build-all
$ ./scripts/makedeb-all
```

And that's it. After makedeb-all, you can find all packages in the pool directory.

While debugging, however, you will probably want to build individual packages instead of all in one go:

For every system, there is a separate fetch-foo script. These fetch-scripts do not track dependencies for you. When not using fetch-all, make sure to download everything you need before trying to build.
The build-foo scripts can be invoked in an arbitrary order. For example, building climacs will automatically compile mcclim if it had not been compiled yet. However, it does not actually create the dumpfile for mcclim, you will still have to call build-mcclim eventually before you can make its .deb file.
Finally, for makedeb-all note that it has one advantage over the individual makedeb-foo scripts: Before calling out to the others, makedeb-all relocates the heap files to non-overlapping locations, speeding up loading of the heap files a little.

If you got this far and have working packages in /opt/steeldump/pool, send me a postcard.

Extending Steeldump