website and documentation out of date

[joaotavora]

bug imported from https://bugs.launchpad.net/slime/+bug/1026319

Bug Description

It seems like the documentation/website for SLIME are out of date. This probably also affects the PDF version of the manual. Stas Boukarev was very, very kind and helped me to get my install of SLIME working but it might be worth it to update the documentation so that other people can get SLIME working for themselves as well.

Specifically:

1. http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/ says that XEmacs is supported. The current stable version of XEmacs does not seem to be supported (https://bugs.launchpad.net/slime/+bug/1025850) with the CVS version of SLIME. Maybe the beta version of XEmacs is supported as was suggested, but I did not try that. GNU Emacs does correctly work though and you might want to at least recommend for people to use GNU Emacs or mention that the stable version of XEmacs won't work. (at least it won't work with the CVS version of SLIME, maybe there is an older snapshot of it that XEmacs would still work with?)

2. http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/doc/html/Installation.html#Installation says to use (slime-setup) in init.el file which did not work correctly for me. (https://bugs.launchpad.net/slime/+bug/1026214) I had to use (slime-setup '(slime-fancy)) instead. This is counter-intuitive to me because I would expect a "basic" version of something to work even if a "fancy" version didn't.

Anyway I just wanted to make the above suggestions. Maybe the issues are only temporary and not worth updating the docs for but I wanted to put my finding together in one place for you guys if you did want to update the docs. Those were the only 2 issues that I found while trying to follow the installation docs to get the system up and working on Windows. Also, thanks again to Stas Boukarev for all the help, I would not have gotten this working without him.

Stas Boukarev (stassats) wrote on 2012-07-19:
Xemacs should be supported, and the bug you reported earlier is caused by not having mule-ucs module installed. But you're right, GNU Emacs is more used by Slime users and in general, so it is more tested and doesn't require any additional modules.

And regarding slime-repl, inferior-lisp should be working without it, I'm not sure why it didn't for you. I tried it with ECL on linux, and it does work for me. I'll try to test it on windows some time later.

But in any case, bare (slime-setup) provides quite a poor experience and documentation says "This is the minimal configuration with the fewest frills. If the basic setup is working, you can try additional modules (Loading Contribs)."

Paul Walz (paul-walz) wrote on 2012-07-20:
Hi Stas,

Thanks for your response, I think I understand what you are saying now.

I re-read your answer to my other bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/slime/+bug/1025850) where you point out that "Slime requires un-define only when the coding system is not utf-8. And un-define needs mule-ucs to be present.". When I initially read your response I did not really understand what you were saying which is why I just took your suggestion to use GNU Emacs. I didn't really understand what "un-define" was, whether or not I could use utf-8 on my system or the fact that mule-ucs is a package.

I don't see the information about un-define, utf-8, and mule-ucs in the manual - maybe it makes sense to add it?

Thanks again for your time.

[joaotavora]

xemacs support has now been dropped in the trunk.

[joaotavora]

@ellerh and @luismbo: to close this issue, I've updated the documentation and created github pages for the HTML version SLIME manual, concentrating website and documentation in github (though the pages still live in my github username -- that can be fixed).

I've included a link to the online version of the documents in the README.md.

This is mostly because I cannot update common-lisp.net. Do you want to do that, should that be abandoned, or should that stick as the primary documentation source (and revert my commit 322d2a1)?

If you're interesting in adopting this new setup, we can easily serve .pdf files from github (near the tarball dists) and create a Makefile target that updates these things automatically.

[luismbo]

Send me a tarball or something and I'll upload the manual to
common-lisp.net...

[luismbo]

Your commit doesn't quite fix the issue since the SLIME webpage lives at common-lisp.net and that's not been updated. Can you post your css somewhere? Did you use CFFI's css or something else?

[luismbo]

Nevermind, I see that you've committed those as well.

[luismbo]

Updated website with fresh documentation and a pointer to the GitHub releases page.

[joaotavora]

yay!