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I would if I knew how; it sure wasn't for lack of my trying to do so, but I don't know enough to pull it off. By the way expecting that something be fixed by a

I would if I knew how; it sure wasn't for lack of my trying to do so, but I don't know enough to pull it off. By the way expecting that something be fixed by a non-specialist just because something is open source and expecting someone to sink their extremely valuable free time so someone could break and destroy that work again, well, that's not only despicable, it's extremely infuriating. All the more infuriating as SBCL wouldn't exist without Solaris, which means someone already broke it at least once and here you come expecting me to not only know what to fix, but invest my life into something where my effort would likely be broken upstream again. This needs to be taken up by the core SBCL team. Meanwhile, pity the time I used to report bugs which just sit there unhandled.

rjsw 7y ago
If none of the core SBCL team use Solaris then they won't know that SBCL doesn't work on it. I'm sure that people will suggest things to try if you post details of what you have done to get it to build. Leave out words like "despicable" though. Your account info states that you want to work with the Solaris successor projects, debugging a complex application is a good way to learn more about an OS.
- Annatar 7y ago
  I've left as much information as I could, but nobody even bothered taking on the bug. The other bug was "fixed" but no information was provided on when it will be rolled into the next release, so that's not useful either, especially since Lisp cannot be built without a working Lisp first, which doesn't work now, so I've no way to test the fix. Working on debugging C code and assembler is one thing, working on debugging Lisp another: I have to master Lisp first, but without working SBCL that's not possible and I'm not switching to an inferior OS just to master something I can't later on deploy on illumos / Solaris. I'd spend an inordinate amount of my free time for dubious gain, something I can no longer afford, so much so that I've stopped sinking my precious free time into computers. Why does software often fail to gain acceptance, respectively why does it become successful? Availability.
  - rjsw 7y ago
    There are regular SBCL releases, something that is fixed will appear in a month or less. If you don't have a working SBCL you can bootstrap it using CLISP or cross-compile from a different OS such as FreeBSD.
    - Annatar 7y ago
      CLISP doesn't work on Solaris either and I've no FreeBSD nor the spare time to figure out how to get it to work. The only Lisp which works is CCL but when I tried to build SBCL with it, the build failed spectacularly. I then went to use CCL but all the getopts examples are for SBCL and since I'm still learning Lisp I couldn't figure out how to make them work on CCL. So I'm busted. Post scriptum: it's been around six months since I've opened those bug reports for i86pc and sparc and there are still no new releases: http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html I wouldn't have written what I have about SBCL and dismal support for Solaris if I hadn't tried to build, debug, package and research it and research throughly I did. As a professional engineer, the first thing I did was read all the documentation and all the INSTALL instructions I could find as well as any other documentation and bug reports I could locate using multiple search engines; the official documentation is very poor for such a big and serious project and in my opinion as an engineer, not very professional at all, especially when compared to corporate documentation efforts. This creates an additional hurdle for someone looking to master Lisp and do so using SBCL. Pity the two intense weeks of my spare time; what a waste of my life since I'm none the smarter or more knowledgeable for it.
      - rjsw 7y ago
        That platform table doesn't represent what will build, only which binary packages are on Sourceforge. I'm running 1.5.4 on NetBSD/amd64 and can build it on i386, sparc, ppc, arm and arm64.
        Annatar 7y ago
        NetBSD also happens to be a completely different operating system and pkgsrc is likely to contain NetBSD-specific patches.

rjsw 7y ago

If none of the core SBCL team use Solaris then they won't know that SBCL doesn't work on it. I'm sure that people will suggest things to try if you post details of what you have done to get it to build. Leave out words like "despicable" though. Your account info states that you want to work with the Solaris successor projects, debugging a complex application is a good way to learn more about an OS.

Annatar 7y ago
I've left as much information as I could, but nobody even bothered taking on the bug. The other bug was "fixed" but no information was provided on when it will be rolled into the next release, so that's not useful either, especially since Lisp cannot be built without a working Lisp first, which doesn't work now, so I've no way to test the fix. Working on debugging C code and assembler is one thing, working on debugging Lisp another: I have to master Lisp first, but without working SBCL that's not possible and I'm not switching to an inferior OS just to master something I can't later on deploy on illumos / Solaris. I'd spend an inordinate amount of my free time for dubious gain, something I can no longer afford, so much so that I've stopped sinking my precious free time into computers. Why does software often fail to gain acceptance, respectively why does it become successful? Availability.
- rjsw 7y ago
  There are regular SBCL releases, something that is fixed will appear in a month or less. If you don't have a working SBCL you can bootstrap it using CLISP or cross-compile from a different OS such as FreeBSD.
  - Annatar 7y ago
    CLISP doesn't work on Solaris either and I've no FreeBSD nor the spare time to figure out how to get it to work. The only Lisp which works is CCL but when I tried to build SBCL with it, the build failed spectacularly. I then went to use CCL but all the getopts examples are for SBCL and since I'm still learning Lisp I couldn't figure out how to make them work on CCL. So I'm busted. Post scriptum: it's been around six months since I've opened those bug reports for i86pc and sparc and there are still no new releases: http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html I wouldn't have written what I have about SBCL and dismal support for Solaris if I hadn't tried to build, debug, package and research it and research throughly I did. As a professional engineer, the first thing I did was read all the documentation and all the INSTALL instructions I could find as well as any other documentation and bug reports I could locate using multiple search engines; the official documentation is very poor for such a big and serious project and in my opinion as an engineer, not very professional at all, especially when compared to corporate documentation efforts. This creates an additional hurdle for someone looking to master Lisp and do so using SBCL. Pity the two intense weeks of my spare time; what a waste of my life since I'm none the smarter or more knowledgeable for it.
    - rjsw 7y ago
      That platform table doesn't represent what will build, only which binary packages are on Sourceforge. I'm running 1.5.4 on NetBSD/amd64 and can build it on i386, sparc, ppc, arm and arm64.
      - Annatar 7y ago
        NetBSD also happens to be a completely different operating system and pkgsrc is likely to contain NetBSD-specific patches.