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Although substantially implemented, McCLIM is still in a hackers-only alpha state right now as far as installation and getting started goes. Here are some notes on my experience of it that the developers may want to look at when they reach the stage of packaging it, and in the meantime may help other Lisp users attain the state of McCLIM hacker more rapidly. Note that I've lumped together problems which may be due to McCLIM with other problems that are more likely Debian issues, CMUCL issues, or whatever: this is not supposed to be one great massive slur on the McLIM developers

This relates to a McCLIM nightly CVS tarball dated Mon, 04 Nov 2002 01:30:14 GMT. Please edit this page when newer versions change stuff

  1. Using Debian unstable with CMUCL, you need the packages cmucl, cmucl-normal (other cores may also work; didn't try) and cmucl-source to get CLX and Gray Streams 
    $ sudo apt-get install cmucl cmucl-source cmucl-normal
$ lisp
* (require 'cmucl-clx)  ; may barf, see below
* (require 'cmucl-graystream)
* (setf *gc-verbose* nil) ; not strictly necessary, but strongly recommended


    ;;; now follow the installation instructions (INSTALL.CMU) from step 3
    If (require 'cmucl-clx) complains about XLIB::MAKE-STATE-MASK being undefined while trying to load hemlock/key-event.x86f, this is probably ignorable

    I get an error when I go to load the :clim-clx-user system (this is with Debian CMUCL 3.1.2 18d+ build 4293 and CVS McCLIM from the 28th of February) in a fresh Lisp image. The error is in function PCL::FIND-CLASS-FROM-CELL: No class named: NIL and occurs when loading recording.lisp. It appears that PCL is trying to load the class COMPLETE-MEDIUM-STATE and failing miserably. The PCL::*DEFFOO-TIMES* family of variables mentioned in the INSTALL file have the proper values.

  2. The Calculator demo is broken in this snapshot: 
    No matching method for the generic-function # Standard-Generic-Function GOATEE::REDISPLAY-ALL (1)
                                              {4894B7F9}>,
when called with arguments (NIL).
    (but by all accounts it wasn't a particularly relevant demo anyway)

    You may wish to run the test with (clim-demo::run-test 'clim-demo::calculator). It worked for me this way. -- Andreas Fuchs?

    I got the same error as before even using this method. -- Matthew Danish?

    Right, talking to Tim Moore revealed as much (-: -- Andreas Fuchs?

  3. The menutest "is self-explanatory" except that the Command window appears to have no purpose. You can select two options from the Buffer menu, or click on the File menu, and should get "you pressed the File button" and similar messages in the window that you started Lisp in. (From looking at the source it seems plausible that the Command window does in fact do nothing, though, so perhaps the documentation is accurate here)

  4. Choosing inappropriate restarts after interrupting clim applications leads to not-obviously-recoverable lossage. The safest way to quit menutest seems to be by sending it a WM_DELETE from your window manager (usually titled `Delete' or `Close'; seldom titled `Destroy') and then choosing the RESTART-EVENT-LOOP restart for the next few "Asynchronous DRAWABLE-ERROR" conditions thrown up.

    These errors have been fixed. -- Andy Hefner?

  5. the slider demo is broken today, too 

    No matching method for the generic-function # Standard-Generic-Function CLIM-INTERNALS::FRAME-MANAGER-PORT (1)
                                              {48974279}>,
when called with arguments (NIL).

Brian Spilsbury? advises that if using CMUCL it's important to start the idle loop

On Debian testing mk-defsystem / common-lisp-controller doesn't seem to want to play with McCLIM: registration goes fine, but FIND-SYSTEM fails. Using ASDF to build the system instead seems to solve this: 

   (asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op 'clim)

-- Nikodemus Siivola?

9 months later, the original author of this page had another round with McCLIM, but this time using SBCL - and got significantly further. If you'd like to see what happened this time it's at http://ww.telent.net/diary/2003/7/#17.7096

this is the only error i got compiling for sbcl

compilation aborted because of fatal error: READ failure in COMPILE-FILE: READER-ERROR at 2069 (line 54, column 71) on #: The symbol "PIXIE/CLX-LOOK" is not external in the CLIM-INTERNALS package.

Timmy Douglas

Late December 2004

I didn't have any troubles with the installation and startup using Allegro. A couple of notes, though:

  1. There's a warning way down at the bottom of the install notes, telling you that you must do xhost + localhost or your freshly-installed copy of McCLIM won't work. Sloppy and eager readers like me can easily miss this warning, and believe that there's something wrong.
  2. If you use MK-DEFSYSTEM with Allegro, then the installer won't work. There's a line in here that tries to use MK-DEFSYSTEM's package that will collide with Allegro COMMON-LISP-USER's import of DEFSYSTEM from its own EXCL package. I have sent a patch about this to the McCLIM developers' list, but it has yet to make its way into the sources.

BTW, I did this with Allegro 6.2. Haven't tested it with 7.0 yet.

Robert Goldman

Installing on OpenMCL as of Jan 2005

Much of the following is probably obvious to experienced Lisp hackers, but as a newbie, it took quite some time to get a listener working. Perhaps this will be of help to someone out there...

Once it's working, you'll be impressed...
Jeremy O'Donoghue

This page is linked from: Documentation  

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