Comment by jordigh

Well, I just started reading Land of Lisp a few weeks ago. It recommends CLisp. I'm quite new to all of lisp, so, let's take a look:

    $ hg clone http://hg.code.sf.net/p/clisp/clisp

Wow, that took a long time to clone. How big is the thing?

    $ du -hs clisp
    147M        clisp

    $ cd clisp
    $ hg branches
    default                    15611:5c63938ef493

Hm, a moderate-sized repo, only 15611 commits and no branching to speak of. Let's look at the latest commits,

    $ hg heads
    changeset:   15611:5c63938ef493
    tag:         tip
    user:        Sam Steingold <[email protected]>
    date:        Wed Oct 22 12:04:12 2014 -0400
    summary:     Fix bug#668 posix:file-state always return NIL for :rdev

What! Last commit was from October last year? Clearly development has slowed to a standstill. Who is generally in charge around here nowadays?

    $ hg churn -r "date('2010 to today')"

    sds                        313529 **************************************
    [email protected]             194383 ********************
    vtz                          2723 *
    ampy                          801 
    haible                        758 
    [email protected]    627 
    [email protected]            279 
    [email protected]               239 
    cvs2hg                         46 

So for the past 5 years, it's been almost all the work of sds, Sam Steingold. Huh. I was expecting Bruno Haible to still be involved, but he seems to be doing almost nothing nowadays. Well, it's not unusual for a free project to be the labour of only a single person, but it's typical to have a lot of small drive-by contributions. Almost nobody except sds has done anything for CLISP for the last five years, which could explain why there have been no releases. But there's been a lot of work being done! Look at all those lines of code that have been modified! Maybe all they really need is a release manager.

Well, does the thing build right now?

    $ ./configure
    ...
    ./configure: libsigsegv was not detected, thus some features, such as
      generational garbage collection and
      stack overflow detection in interpreted Lisp code
    cannot be provided.
    Please install libsigsegv like this:
    ...

Okay, fine, I'll install it. Let me try again,

     $ ./configure
    ...
    ./configure: libsigsegv was not detected, thus some features, such as
      generational garbage collection and
      stack overflow detection in interpreted Lisp code
    cannot be provided.
    Please install libsigsegv like this:
    ...

What? Didn't I just do that?

    $ apt-cache policy libsigsegv-dev
    libsigsegv-dev:
      Installed: 2.9-4
      Candidate: 2.9-4
      Version table:
         2.10-4+b1 0
             -1 http://ftp.ca.debian.org/debian/ unstable/main amd64 Packages
     *** 2.9-4 0
            500 http://ftp.ca.debian.org/debian/ wheezy/main amd64 Packages
            100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Okay, maybe my version of libsigsegv is too old. But a version newer than Debian's oldstable is mighty demanding of a package whose development has slowed down to nothing. So at this point I'm considering if I want to debug their build system or not. I might. Or perhaps someone else will. My conclusion is that CLisp development is almost dead, yet there certainly is something worthwhile releasing here since the last release in 2010.