[Lispweb] Araneida

[jeff@inf.ed.ac.uk]

Quoting Edi Weitz <edi at agharta.de>:

> On Thu, 21 Apr 2005 22:54:39 +0100, jeff at inf.ed.ac.uk wrote:
>
> > Thanks!  However, one thing I notice right away is that he says
> > this:
> >
> >   I decided to use the TBNL and CL-WHO libraries that Edi Weitz
> >   developed to provide a higher level of abstraction ... There are a
> >   number of pre-reqs for these libraries, so I downloaded them as
> >   well ... Here are all the CL packages that I downloaded:
> >
> >     * TBNL: ...
> >     * CL-WHO: ...
> >     * KMRCL: ...
> >     * MD5: ...
> >     * CL-BASE64: ...
> >     * CL-PPCRE: ...
> >     * URL-REWRITE: ...
> >     * ASDF: ...
> >
> > Gak!
>
> Well, that's what ASDF-INSTALL is for.  You can download and install
> TBNL and all of these libraries with one line of Lisp.

My concerns are more about complexity and possible version mismatches.

Perhaps it's better now, but it used to be that if you wanted
to use several separately developed pieces of Lisp software
together, it was often difficult to find versions that actually
would work together.

Then, when new versions appear, you can have the same problem all
over again.

Another problem is that I will have to check the licenses of
all of those things before I can use them.

By way of comparison, I use the Jena RDF toolkit in Java.
It needs a bunch of jar files apart from the one containing
Jena itself; and at one point, I had to check all the licenses.
However, the Jena developers package all of it in one zip
or tar.gz file, and they've already checked that the versions
they've chosen all work together.

Obviously, there are potential problems if I use other Java
software that depends on similar jar file.  (Maybe it also wants
to use the Xerces XML parser, for example.)  There can sometimes
be a version problem then, and it can be a pain to resolve it.
But so far, I haven't hit any serious problems.

-- Jeff