Hi Andreas, On 07/30/2014 02:51 PM, Andreas Tille wrote:
Hi Ira, On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 02:43:40PM -0700, Ira Kalet wrote:Thanks for your continued interest. I actually have some time and energy to work on this now. Building an executable from source in Common Lisp is very different from C or other compiled-only languages. "Make" is not applicable. It will have Lisp implementation dependencies, so the build for CMUCL will be different from CLISP and they will yet be different from ACL. Truth is that right now I only know how to build an executable in ACL but will look into the others. I will also need to know what the structure of a Debian package is. I have an old book, "The Debian System", that should help as an orientation. Is there a quick tutorial on the Debian packaging mechanism to help me get started? Might be quicker than reading the book.We hope to get a good beginner intro (with links to more advanced packaging documentation) in our Debian Med team policy: http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/docs/policy.html Any question about this is very welcome on our mailing list. Kind regards Andreas.
Thanks for the reference to the policy and other documents. I now have a pretty good sense of what is involved.
1. I checked a little further because there are other Common Lisp code packages in Debian, and I have some installed. It seems that they use the Common Lisp Controller and asdf (packages common-lisp-controller and cl-asdf). I have these installed. I already wrote asdf code for SLIK and can probably do the same for Prism. There is another package, dh-lisp, that claims to help create Common Lisp based packages. I am also reading the Common Lisp in Debian manual. It is very helpful but insufficient.
I think the SLIK library should be a separate package, and the prism package can then depend on it. Since SLIK is very small (only about 10K lines of code in 25 or so files, it would be more manageable. Also it is a library rather than a runnable program. The full prism program is an extra layer of complexity.
So, obviously, other Debian packages are written in Common Lisp, and I will take a look to see how they are organized. The one that would be the most like Prism is the Portable Allegroserve package, cl-aserve. I'll take a look at that. However, I do not have the resources that the Lisp hackers at Franz, Inc. do.
2. Which brings me to the next issue. Because of my health issues (I think I wrote earlier about this - I have advanced metastatic kidney cancer that has spread to my brain, as well as lungs and abdomen. I will learn more about the status of the brain mets tomorrow afternoon) I cannot commit to any long term support, and certainly cannot fulfil the role of maintainer. I don't know who could do this. There is one person who might be able to - I will ask him.
3. Finally, there is still the issue of what the US FDA might say about distribution within the US, as software products that do what Prism does are considered medical devices and cannot be distributed without FDA 510K premarket approval, an onerous process to be sure. It does not matter that no money is involved. What do you do about other debian-med packages? Might any of them be considered a medical device?
Sorry for the long winded email. I will send you an update tomorrow night about my health status.
-- Ira J. Kalet, Ph.D., FACMI Professor Emeritus, Radiation Oncology Professor Emeritus, Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education Email: ikalet@uw.edu Web: http://faculty.washington.edu/ikalet/ -----------------------