[developers] LKB with McCLIM graphics on Mac

[John Carroll]

This has been taking me much longer than I expected. Although McCLIM is functionally almost complete, it’s a bit fragile if you don’t exactly play by the rules, and often the rules have to be guessed at or worked out from the source code. Also, I’ve had to work around the unsatisfactory appearance of some things, especially windows created by accept-values. I’ve done new implementations of all of the LKB accept-values calls by explicitly programming gadgets and callbacks.

As an example, I attach a screenshot of my select-file dialog. I've realised why select-file is missing from McCLIM - as of CLIM 2 it’s been removed from the standard!

Ann: so I can test it well, what problems have you had with file selection in Allegro? Are the problems in Windows or in Linux? Might they be caused by having lots of mounted network filesystems, unusual structures of symbolic links, or some of the weird varieties of Microsoft file system mounting (see https://sourceforge.net/p/sbcl/mailman/message/19520335/)?

Apart from the amount of time I’ve spent, I’m pretty pleased with how it’s shaping up.

John


On 7 Nov 2016, at 11:17, Ann Copestake <aac10 at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> sounds good - re 1 - file selection is barely working in Allegro right now anyway.  I'll be happy to do some testing if you like, just not this week ...
> it would be nice to fix that type bug but not exactly essential ... it's been there quite a few years, after all.
> 
> All best,
> 
> Ann
> 
> On 07/11/2016 11:14, John Carroll wrote:
>> This is going so well that I think it’s going to end up as a viable new public version of the LKB for the average non-expert user. So I’ll finish the job off and make sure it runs in SBCL. Clozure CL and SBCL both have good Linux versions, so it might also be useful for the average Linux user.
>> 
>> In total I’ve made around 50 minor edits to LKB code. The main reasons have been:
>> 
>> 1. McCLIM does not (yet) implement all of the CLIM spec
>> 2. The CLIM spec is unclear in places, and the LKB sometimes relies too much on the behaviour of Allegro CL CLIM
>> 3. Some LKB code uses features of Allegro CL CLIM that are not in the spec
>> 
>> Re 1, the largest gap is lack of select-file, so I’m adopting/adapting a file selector from another CLIM-based program. In category 2, the most widespread problems are omission of explicit define-presentation-type declarations for presentation types, and an assumption that panes are created ‘eagerly’ - whereas McCLIM does this lazily when it actually displays the window (which seems to be allowed by the spec). There’s one issue in category 3 that currently has me stumped for a work-around (changing the colour of text before a redisplay) but I’m sure I’ll figure something out.
>> 
>> So far I haven’t tried to go further than (load-system "lkb”), and haven’t looked at any non-graphics related code, e.g. in pvm, psql.
>> 
>> John
>> 
>> PS While I’m at it, should I fix the bug described at http://moin.delph-in.net/LkbBugs ? It’s probably in code I originally wrote in src/main/checktypes.lsp
>> 
>> 
>> On 5 Nov 2016, at 08:01, Ann Copestake <aac10 at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> Fantastic!  
>>> Did you manage to sort out the other Allegro-specific stuff?  I don't remember exactly what the remaining issues were with the SBCL version.
>>> 
>>> All best,
>>> 
>>> Ann
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 04/11/2016 23:56, John Carroll wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>> 
>>>> See the attached screenshot (or http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~johnca/LKB_CCL_McCLIM_2016-11-04.jpg if the mailing list strips it out): the LKB with McCLIM graphics running in Clozure Common Lisp on a Mac. It’s taken me around 3 days to get it working. There are still a few interface glitches and hacks I need to sort out, but the basics are there.
>>>> 
>>>> John
>>>> 
>>>> PS There was a posting in January by a guy asking about LKB/McCLIM, but it turned out to be much more tricky than he was suggesting.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>> 
> 



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