Bug#396049: ITP: alice -- Alice programming language

[Kari Pahula <kaol@debian.org>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Kari Pahula <kaol@debian.org>


* Package name    : alice
  Version         : 1.3.0
  Upstream Author : Programming Systems Lab, Saarland University
* URL             : http://ps.uni-sb.de/alice/
* License         : GPL, BSD-like
  Programming Lang: C++, SML, Alice
  Description     : Alice programming language

 A functional programming language based on Standard ML, extended with
 support for concurrent, distributed, and constraint programming. The
 Alice ML language extends Standard ML with several new features:
 .
  - Futures: laziness and light-weight concurrency with data-flow
    synchronisation
  - Higher-order modules: higher-order functors and abstract
    signatures
  - Packages: integrating static with dynamic typing and
    first class modules 
  - Pickling: higher-order type-safe, generic & platform-independent
    persistence 
  - Components: platform-independence and type-safe dynamic loading of
    modules
  - Distribution: type-safe cross-platform remote functions and network
    mobility 
  - Constraints: solving combinatorical problems using constraint
    propagation and programmable search

I've been wanting to package this one for a long time already, and
started looking into it this weekend.

There's still a few issues that I'll have to resolve.  The release
tarballs at http://ps.uni-sb.de/alice/download/sources/ have the alice
runtime system in compiled bytecode format only.  Not having the
source would fail DFSG, but fortunately it's available in the CVS.
For security fixes' sake I'll retool the build system to compile the
bytecode on debian/rules build and not just include the sources along
with upstream's binary blobs.

Also, Alice doesn't seem to be quite FHS compliant.