Quicksys

Description

Quicksys is a tool for fetching Common Lisp systems, regardless of the Quicklisp distribution they are catalogued in. To achieve that, this software is purposely built as a hardcoded catalog of famous Quicklisp distributions, including:

• cl-bodge
• cl21
• shirakumo
• ultralisp

You may also add your own distributions at your will.

Motivation

Quicklisp is an awesome tool for fetching systems, which you may use on your Common Lisp projects. However, Quicklisp only fetches systems from its central repository, by default. Adding a new repository implies manual management of distributions (here called dists), in order to fetch systems that are not in the central repo.

In an effort to speed up the development of software in Common Lisp, we present Quicksys as a means of unifying some of the most popular distributions. This way, one can load specific systems, given that one also knows in which distribution it is; or even, one may also install a distribution on Quicklisp without ever manually configurating it.

Requirements

• A Common Lisp implementation
• Quicklisp

How to use

Quicksys exports some symbols which may be easily used. The following instructions relate to the most important operations.

Installing a system

Systems may be loaded regardless of whether its dists were installed under Quicklisp or not.

To install a system from a dist that was not installed, use the following:

(qs:quickload system-atom :dist dist-name)

Where system-name is the proper identifier for the desired system, and dist-name is a proper name for a dist -- see "Installing a dist".

You may also use qs:quickload in the same way one would use ql:quickload. The effect is the same, for dists that are already installed.

Installing a dist

One may easily install a dist by using:

(qs:install-dist dist-name)

Where dist-name is a name (symbol or string) for a specific dist. Available dists may be listed using Quicksys' apropos command:

(qs:dist-apropos "")

This outputs a list of all available dists currently hardcoded, with their respective symbols and URLs.

After installing a dist, you may install any system using Quicklisp or Quicksys normally.

Removing a dist

Just like installation, one may remove an already installed dist by using a single command:

(qs:uninstall-dist dist-name)

License

This project is distributed under the MIT License.