Essential kit items: Building SBCL on Gentoo with musl
Steel Bank Common Lisp is another must-have tool in my kit, since I use it to run my hybrid irc/Telegram bot and many other daily use items. In my previous post I documented how I managed to get gcc-4.9.4 massaged into shape, so this post will serve as a reference on how to do the same for SBCL so in the future I don't have to spend the day researching fixes and locating obscure patchsets.
When building many things using musl, one will often run into "undefined reference to `memcpy@GLIBC_*'" type errors, since glibc uses versioned symbols and musl does not. SBCL is no different, but fortunately a little digging turned up a working patchset on the SBCL mailing list which works beautifully, so I didn't have to spend the better part of a day cobbling one together as I did for gcc. I have preserved a copy of the patchset here and will definitely do my best to maintain these into the future should any major changes occur.
Much like Ada, SBCL requires itself or another ANSI common lisp to build. I decided to use CLISP (version 2.49.92) to perform this task, as it can be quickly built from sources using gcc only (and I didn't want to use a pre-built sbcl binary of unknown provenance). After getting clisp in place, building SBCL is mostly painless using the following steps:
I downloaded the 1.5.7 sources from my site and verified the checksums:
curl -O http://btc.info.gf/devel/gentoo/distfiles/dev-lisp/sbcl/1.5.7/sbcl-1.5.7-source.tar.bz2 curl -O http://btc.info.gf/devel/gentoo/distfiles/dev-lisp/sbcl/1.5.7/Manifest.sha512
Unpack the sources and enter the directory:
tar xjf sbcl-1.5.7-source.tar.bz2 && cd sbcl-1.5.7
Get the musl patchset and apply them:
wget -q -r -nd -N --no-parent -R "index.html*" http://btc.info.gf/devel/gentoo/distfiles/dev-lisp/sbcl/patches/ for i in *.patch; do patch -p1 < $i; done
Build using CLISP and install:
./make.sh "clisp" --fancy ./install.sh
The above recipe has so far worked quite nicely, having been tested by running the above mentioned irc bot and a few other essential lisp programs. I will update this post if/when any bugs are found or if any changes are made.
