Support for finding projects in tarballs

[vseloved]

Hi Xach,

For deployment of my internal projects I needed a way to distribute custom libraries as a single file a la java jars (the obvious choice being tarballs). As quicklisp has all the pieces needed for that, I've just re-used them and added a separate searcher function, that searches in ASDF:CENTRAL-REGISTRY dirs for tarballs and unpacks them in the same dir.

I though that this may be an interesting addition to quicklisp-client. The current implementation is more of a proof-of-concept sort, as it doesn't involve ASDF source registry (should it?) and unpacks the tarballs in-place (probably, there should be a more robust variant). If you have any ideas, how to improve that, I'm ready to implement them.

Vsevolod

[quicklisp]

I don't quite understand the use-case. Is this for when the tarballs are local rather than available via HTTP?

And there's no formal index, just an ad-hoc contents-of-a-directory thing?

[vseloved]

Yes, when the tarballs are local: as the user doesn't have control over what's in the repository, this can be one of the ways to override some system from upstream. For example, if you have local changes, but you don't want to distribute them as source tree.

It may also be similar to local projects, but I understand (or, maybe, misunderstand) local projects as more suited for development environment, not for production deployment.

Yes, no index.

[quicklisp]

This is an interesting idea, but I don't think it should be part of Quicklisp. It would be better as a separate project.