Command-line invocation updates

[Brian Rice]

Oops, I didn't need to resend this. Sorry for the dupe message.

On Jan 18, 2006, at 2:23 PM, Brian Rice wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I apologize for the recent downtimes. I unfortunately am in the  
> dark as to the reason, despite requests for information from the  
> administrators. If someone can provide a quick mirror of the  
> website, it would provide some short-term relief until I have  
> ensured a deal for my new server.
>
> Anyway, I have made the arrangements to make Slate more convenient  
> as a command-line tool. These changes are in alpha and are easily  
> invoked as noted:
>
> 1) The default Makefile target now builds a full image. So "make &&  
> sudo make install" should now be all that is needed for Slate  
> installation.
> 2) VM builds now know where the installation path is, and can pick  
> up the canonical slate.image from there, if one hasn't been  
> specified on the command line AND a slate.image is not in the  
> current directory. So Slate can now definitely run from anywhere on  
> the file system.
> 3) A complete Unix man page is now available and is installed with  
> the "make install" target as appropriate.
> 4) Image-level argument handling is now systematized, and --image- 
> help will list
> the docstrings of any regularized option handlers.
> 5) load: now handles #! syntax, and will soon support specialized  
> facilities for script files, eventually including sandboxing.  
> Slate's command-line syntax also now has a -c option for invoking  
> Slate source as such scripts, and if the first command-line option  
> is not a -option, it interprets it as a script's filename.
> 6) A proof-of-concept shell script exists in the Slate repository  
> as demo/wc, which
> emulates GNU's wc from their core utilities package. Right now it  
> isn't quite working because of a fix I need to bootstrap in for  
> sequence.slate #join, but the patch is in the repository. I'll  
> update when it can be run out-of-the-box.
> 7) The post-bootstrap now has its load-sequence specified in a file  
> that is itself loaded externally, called src/mobius/prelude.slate,  
> so it can be modified and then "make bootstrap" re-run to create  
> customized images quickly.
> 8) The FFI has been added to prelude.slate, along with many other  
> libraries. A few libraries have been extracted from the bootstrap  
> into this list to make the core image less bloated and to allow for  
> more flexible choice.
>
> Coming soon:
>
> * SLATEPATH environment variable will be used to assist load: calls  
> to find relatively-specified files in the standard library from  
> anywhere on the system. This will fix the use of the AutoLoader  
> outside of the Slate source tree root directory. An alternative was  
> to abuse the "server:path" notation to have a virtual Slate source  
> server. I may yet include that, but it's tricky and there are more  
> urgent priorities.
> * More common plugins and sources installed globally as  
> appropriate. I'm also inclined to move the time, socket, and  
> platform plugins into the VM since their dependencies are trivial,  
> and I'd rather make VM builds more modular to make it easier to  
> customize than put up with the performance issues until a compiler- 
> based FFI is ready.
> * Fixes for the bootstrapping process bugs that I introduced last  
> week. I've had to improve my local testing setup and workflow to  
> make cross-platform testing easier, so that took some additional time.
> * Much more, stay tuned...
>
> --
> -Brian
> http://tunes.org/~water/brice.vcf
>

--
-Brian
http://tunes.org/~water/brice.vcf

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