Heads up: clc security problem

There is a security problem with common-lisp-controller: please read DSA-811 and upgrade as soon as possible.

The irony is that this is caused by moving to a simpler architecture because of (among other problems) security concerns :-(.

The sparc of fustration

sbcl now seems to compile on alpha and ppc again, on amd64 it already worked. sparc is leaving me in suspense already for 6 days now, on the buildd page you can see it going up and down the build queue. Highest position so far: 3. Now it is at 5 again.

Anyway, as sbcl has to wait on glibc to enter testing, which is waiting for gcc-4.0 (nice overview here), I reckon a new testing sbcl is not going to happen anytime soon.

sbcl progress

For the last few days I've been searching for obscure sbcl crashes. It seems at the end it will not only crash if the locale is not known, but also if you are running a threading-enabled sbcl on a 2.4 kernel.
I narrowed the problem down to sbcl crashing in a pretty standard libc call: nl_langinfo. This seems related to the fact that on 2.6 glibc uses futex'es to lock non-re-entrant functions, but on 2.4 it uses signals but I fail to see how this could create a simple crash. Trying to investigate it is rather difficult because the problems changes if you use ltrace or strace, actually the crash location moves sometimes.
So in the end I decided:

• To make sbcl-with-threading die on a 2.4 kernel or if NPTL is not available.
• make separate sbcl images without threading for people that are still using 2.4

.
So now we have multiple cl-debian repositories:

• deb http://people.debian.org/~pvaneynd/cl-sarge-packages ./

  for sarge 2.6 kernel

• deb http://people.debian.org/~pvaneynd/cl-sarge24-packages ./

  for sarge 2.4 kernel

• deb http://people.debian.org/~pvaneynd/cl-hoary-packages ./

  for hoary 2.6 kernel

• deb http://people.debian.org/~pvaneynd/cl-hoary24-packages ./

  for hoary 2.4 kernel

• deb http://people.debian.org/~pvaneynd/cl-breezy-packages ./

  for breezy (only 2.6 kernel)

• deb http://people.debian.org/~pvaneynd/cl-packages ./

  for sid (only 2.6 kernel)

Regarding my darcs repository (at http://cl-debian.alioth.debian.org/repository/pvaneynd: for now it is rather nice to work with darcs. The only problem I'm having is with large changes like moving lazy-sbcl from version 0.9.0 to 0.9.3 with all the changes involved. But going step by step also seems to work well.

3 up, 2 down

The last few days I've been buzy putting my numerous packages into darcs. So far I quite like this versioning system, there are however a few problems:

• it cannot handle epochs
• a lot of my packages' upstream seems to have gone or moved
• some of my packages are native packages, but they are not directly related to debian. I think this was just because the previous maintainer (like me) was part of the upstream team and disliked the additional problems caused by a non-native package. This is starting to bite however and when I try to reverse the situation I often see that the debian version is higher then the last official release of that project. So I need to use epochs. See point 1 :-(.

So my big plan to have all my packages in darcs and attracting a multitude of helpers seems to have fallen foul. I will still try to get this into some shape and make it available...

sbcl has run into some gcc-4 problem on some platforms and cmucl won't even build using gcc-4. A lot of work needs to be done and there is so little time, mostly because of the evil daen free library that is sucking away hours like a baby milk.

New Common Lisp based repositories

I've expanded my repositories on people.debian.org. Add to /etc/apt/sources.list:

• for sarge (aka stable):

  deb http://people.debian.org/~pvaneynd/cl-sarge-packages ./

• for unstable (for packages still in the NEW queue and pre-release stuff):

  deb http://people.debian.org/~pvaneynd/cl-packages ./

• and finally (upon great request) for ubuntu/hoary:

  deb http://people.debian.org/~pvaneynd/cl-hoary-packages ./

I also subscribed the cl-debian mailing list to most Common Lisp packages in debian, so members will see traffic when people upload new versions etc. Feel free to suggest new packages by subscribing them to the pts@qa.

I'm also planning to upload an experimental lazy allocating sbcl to those repositories, but will not upload it into debian proper unless there is popular demand for it.

19b-pre1 as debian package

in the p.d.o/~pvaneynd repository and directly here.

created a MOTU Common Lisp team for ubuntu

I created a Common Lisp MOTU team for ubuntu. As the entry requirements for membership are quite a bit lower for ubuntu then for debian I hope that more people will want to co-maintain packages.
To this end I should investigate version control systems that can handle 'upstream' in CVS or darcs. Maybe the debian directory in darcs and then use dpatch to patch the original source.
In related news I got the lazy allocation patch for sbcl. In the end it gets pretty nice I only need to use the sigsegv handler for static, read-only and linkage-table space. For the dynamic space the lisp uses the C alloc function to allocate memory, and using this function you can mmap memory on the fly. This patch opens the way for having a bigger on-demand dynamic space or a dynamic space with holes. But reception to the patch has been rather cold. I'll try to create a sbcl-lazy package for debian anyway, but only on the p.d.o repository, not in unstable unless people demand it.