Re: [Next browser] Common Lisp: mgl-pax: Package SWANK-BACKEND does not exist.

[Andy Patterson <ajpatter@uwaterloo.ca>]

Hi all,

There are a few different messages in this thread that I could reply
to, but I'll do my best to address them all here.

On Fri, 24 Aug 2018 14:56:19 +0200
ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) wrote:

> Hi Pierre,
> 
> Pierre Neidhardt <ambrevar@gmail.com> skribis:
> 
> > I have no clue what this SWANK-BACKEND is.  I can find
> > SWANK/BACKEND in the source however.  Maybe my misunderstanding of
> > Common Lisp...
> >
> > Any clue?  
> 
> I’m clueless ;-) but I’ve Cc’d one of our local CL experts.
> Any ideas, Andy?

Expert is a bit strong, but I'll try my best.  I wasn't able to dive
deep into this particular issue this weekend, but I did try to bring
myself back up to speed by rebuilding the currently upstreamed CL
packages as well as my local additions.  The good news here is that
I've finally found out why our slynk package doesn't build on sbcl, and
that might be relevant to this problem.

As for the initial error - it looks like it's because swank's system
definition file only compiles swank-loader, which I guess is because it
wants to use that loader to load the rest of the system.  As a result
the swank-backend package never gets added to the built swank package.

The PR linked in the upstream bug report looks like it addresses that
issue by adding all of the source files to the system's components.
The log listed in the report when using that PR doesn't show the full
details - but I've just found out that some warnings are being treated
as errors by sbcl.  It might be that there's some warning shown earlier
on which is causing the reported compilation failure, despite the fact
that it's reported as a benign-seeming warning.  I haven't been able
to figure out whether or not this is a guix-specific problem.

I haven't forgotten that I'd promised to deliver some build system
improvements a while back - I've gotten that all formatted into commits
now so I'll try to send that in later this week if I can find time.

> 
> Ludo’.

Hoping that helps,

--
Andy