Exposing mahogany's REPL

[jcguu95]

Mahogany is a common lisp application, so one should control it by hopping into its repl. The following achieved that for stumpwm easily, and it should work with mahogany with very slight changes.

My question is whether this should be in mahogany, or should we just teach the users in the documentation?

I think it is better to keep mahogany to its absolute essentials, which makes the maintenance much easier in the long run. The cool functionalities can be equally realized with contribs or config examples.

(defcommand slynk (port) ((:string "Port number: "))
  (sb-thread:make-thread
   (lambda ()
     (slynk:create-server :port (parse-integer port) :dont-close t))
   :name (format nil "manual slynk port ~s" port))
  (message "Port ~s opened." port))

[sdilts]

Putting this in the main codebase is probably fine, although it would probably need to be in its own module, as somebody may want to use slime instead.

I might actually prefer to have this in the main repo due to how much more sensitive to disruption Mahogany is than stumpwm; any sort of disruption in the main thread (breakpoints, exceptions, etc) that causes it to be blocked also stops input from being processed; you can't even switch to a different tty once it hangs. Having the best way to do this in the codebase would probably avoid lots of unhappy users who might not do it correctly.

[sdilts]

As a side note, that code in particular wouldn't be accepted due to it using SBCL specific code; unless it proves impossible, I'd like to keep mahogany portable.

[jcguu95]

Right, so perhaps in the contrib form that's put in the main repo.

That code has many problems. One is that it uses the sbcl contrib sb-bsd-sockets, which is currently missing from the sbcl package in guix. I have built an sbcl with bsd-sockets, but it will take me some time to push that into the guix channel.