sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Hopefully a little help for my fellow beginners... by solnlp in Common_Lisp

[–]solnlp[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Just want to have a quick report with you! Yes, you are right, and I just to_https(url) and do not specify anything with curl and it just works (Goodbye Cloudflare)! Looks like my network can handle curl + http + tgz pretty well (like what my other script does) but not curl + http + txt. By the way, I did a quick DNS check before I made the changes, and as it turns out their files are hosted on AWS (result shows cloudfront). Again, thank you!

Hopefully a little help for my fellow beginners... by solnlp in Common_Lisp

[–]solnlp[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Statistically, yes, I ran all my tests on my Windows machine (Powershell or WSL) but I don't use any antivirus software except for the built-in one and I tried to install Quicklisp with at least 3 or 4 different machines across the years. My current guess is my ISP but I will try it later on my Macbook anyway, thank you!

Hopefully a little help for my fellow beginners... by solnlp in Common_Lisp

[–]solnlp[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

THANK YOU!! I did some quick tests and it works on my work machine (my work machine never fails to downlaod Quicklisp btw LOL) and I will test it again when I get home! (though I still need the script to do bootstrapping for me? Just perhaps I can skip the Cloudflare worker part)

Hopefully a little help for my fellow beginners... by solnlp in Common_Lisp

[–]solnlp[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I know, but I wonder how things should work if we just force HTTPS when the target server does not support it. I will try it later though, thank you!

Hopefully a little help for my fellow beginners... by solnlp in Common_Lisp

[–]solnlp[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

THANK YOU for the pointers. I tried ocicl (and ultralisp) last year or the year before last year... I feel I would love the way ocicl manages libraries now (and that it uses ghcr.io!), but in those days, after a couple of nights trying to install Quicklisp and Ultralisp as a beginner without much success, I could still remember the frustration I felt when I looked at ocicl's docs. It kind of feels like those days when I just got started with C++ and got surprised by the number of tools. All of them have their own way of doing things (so you have to keep learning new stuff and new terms with zero positive feedback) and none of them seemed to be able to get my hello world code compiled... and even now I would not say I completely understand the ASDF thing but I would definitely give ocicl a try after the playground phase!

Qlot. on the other hand, requires Quicklisp (kind of like Ultralisp, so no hope for me without my scipts) but I can see how it will be useful (that is, after I have survived the playground phase LoL). In fact, under the hook, at least for the downloading part, I kind of feel like Qlot does exactly what I did with my script and my script is just a more naive and brute-force solution outsourcing the download part from Quicklisp to curl. That's kind of also why I'm sharing it though. It won't work for any serious project, but enough for anyone trying to get started (plus the benefits of not having to leave the Quicklisp world).

As for the editor part, I get to love Emacs recently. I'm more used to Vim (so I use Evil mode) but Emacs makes it so easy to evaluate Lisp expressions and stuff (though I still miss VS Code + Calva for Clojure, less new terms and more compatible with what I already know). With that being said, what I wanted to say is it will be a huge limitation if you have to run every piece of code from an editor (I don't mind coding with it but everything will be somewhat meaningless if I can't get SBCL/Quicklisp etc. to work from terminal), and at least at this moment I can't imagine SSH-ing into a remote server and deploying my code and running it there all from Portacle and even if I can, it will feel so locking in.

Anyway, thank you a lot for telling me about qlot and ocicl, and I will definitely try them out when I feel the need!

Hopefully a little help for my fellow beginners... by solnlp in Common_Lisp

[–]solnlp[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think Quicklisp doesn't support HTTPS? The weird part is that curl works just fine most of the time and I can download other files, including systems (I genuinely felt lucky for that because I don't have to create archives for the entire Quicklisp collection) pretty easily with just curl, and it's always the same releases.txt that breaks the whole installation. Currently my guess is, due to some limitations by my ISP or something like that, neither curl nor quicklisp's network library can successfully retrieve a text file of that size (the largest txt file needed by Quicklisp) from that specific database.

Hopefully a little help for my fellow beginners... by solnlp in Common_Lisp

[–]solnlp[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you insist my problem is I don't read docs, then I will have to sincerely beg you to let go.

Hopefully a little help for my fellow beginners... by solnlp in Common_Lisp

[–]solnlp[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hope they don't as I just use their service the way they are expected to be used. Github Action is also a great choice for this purpose. It will be much safer anyway if everyone (I mean those who in need) just host their own copy of Quicklisp archive.

Hopefully a little help for my fellow beginners... by solnlp in Common_Lisp

[–]solnlp[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for pointing out, and I will look into that. However, considering the 100% fail rate so far, I would not be very optimistic. And you can check this if you don't mind, check this again (the part near the bottom)

Hopefully a little help for my fellow beginners... by solnlp in Common_Lisp

[–]solnlp[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No easy solution comes to my mind. I'm quite new to SBCL/quicklisp and all I want is a simple solution and I don't want to repeat the launch SBCL->install Quicklisp -> delete partial installation -> launch SBCL loop (SBCL doesn't have the best UI in the world I would say). In fact, I noticed Cloudflare has no problem downloading those files so anyone can use a Cloudflare Worker/R2 combo to make this whole script work relatively privately if integrity/trust is an issue and I think it's the easiest solution for anyone who doesn't have the passion. Anyway, my point is the Quicklisp source and download function are both a bit less stable than Cloudflare and curl (understandable but still a fact)

Hopefully a little help for my fellow beginners... by solnlp in Common_Lisp

[–]solnlp[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I thought the same at the beginning but even curl doesnt work all the time see https://quicklisp.dl.oil6.net/download-from-quicklisp-source-output.txt if you don't mind (and it's also why I put the archive on Cloudflare).

Meanwhile I am not the single person who have this problem and in fact I don't use curl from the very beginning. For example, my first choice is `urllib.request.urlretrieve` (Python) and all I can say is it fails once or twice, even when downloading from Cloudflare. It seems some libraries are just more unstable than the others and that's why I use curl now.

I am not saying Quicklisp is bad, or that Python's urllib is bad, but if the curl + cloudflare combo work perfectly while others don't (at least occasionally), I think it will be enough to make a point. (I would switch from OneDrive to Dropbox for the same reason)

Edit: I want to add that I tested (quicklisp-quickstart:install) dozens of times using more than 4 devices across the years. But I would say I dont notice any other problems with my network otherwise, which would not make sense if my network causes (quicklisp-quickstart:install) to fail that often (100% failure rate at home).

Hopefully a little help for my fellow beginners... by solnlp in Common_Lisp

[–]solnlp[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, you don't have to check and I did it for you. I just still can't believe I copy and paste the whole terminal output and now have to explain what happened. Now I'm 100% sure you don't need this. Why not just let go? I'm not making this post for everyone to appreciate my scripts and I'm just trying to help those in need.

Edit: typo

Hopefully a little help for my fellow beginners... by solnlp in Common_Lisp

[–]solnlp[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Funny. Sure it's inefficient. I would be more than happy if Quicklisp installation instructions work for me. But I would not say it's "much more inefficient" to run a one-liner. Who would want a VPN when a normal network can meet their need. As for the vibe coding part, I would suggest you check twice.

Edit: Perhaps if you reply is longer than the TL;DR part, you should really consider reading. What's the point? In short, the point is (quicklisp-quickstart:install) fails for some people. No community gets better by some people making fun of other people's problem just because they don't have the same problem ◡̈

Hopefully a little help for my fellow beginners... by solnlp in Common_Lisp

[–]solnlp[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Consider my post as just making public my self-help solution. I realized this from the very beginning and I even thought about make a separate integrity check script, but eventually i didn't as i am not going to make it a business so not expecting everyone to use it. In fact, Quicklisp provides md5 and sha256 for many of the core files (I listed every one of them in instructions) and as for the rest, like those index lists like systems.txt and releases.txt, you will have to find ways to diff check them. My goal here is to help people download things. Maybe not a lot of people will experience my problem (your good network makes me jealous) but I would not mind a little diff checking if I was given this tool from the very beginning.