Libre Software Meeting 2004
The Libre Software Meeting 2004 was held in Bordeaux on July 6th-10th 2004. The meeting included a high-level languages track with a presentation about Common Lisp, and there was a room available for CL hacking sessions. Much fun was had by all.

Photos are available at http://dept-info.labri.fr/~strandh/LSM2004/, courtesy of Aleksandar Bakic.

The LSM is an inexpensive and informal event. The organization tends to be a little haphazard, but this is compensated for by a congenial atmosphere. Cheap accommodation in almost salubrious University dorms is available, or there are plenty of hotels downtown. Bordeaux is 3 hours by train from Paris, and good food and wine abounds.

See http://wiki.ael.be/rmll2004/index.php/ThemeLangagesDeHautNiveauPourApplications and https://abul.org/Rencontres-mondiales-du-Logiciel,135.html.

Things to do

There has been some discussion on irc about whether we should get together and hack collectively on some project, as opposed to 2002 where people tended to work on their own individual projects. Two possibilities have been advanced so far

  1. Frustrated by the recent poor security record of CVS (and, really, anything else written in C that listens on a network port), we thought about implementing the Arch version control system in CL, starting from the specification (I hope there is a specification ...) (There's a specification for the changeset format; implementing commits and so forth off of that doesn't seem terribly difficult. The tricky part, of course, is starting to work on merging ...). darcs also provides an interesting alternative to cvs and arch, with a well thought out patch model suitable for distributed development and since its written in haskell it cant be all evil. however, darcs doesn't have a specification, which is what is interesting here.

  2. The alternative, which admits a greater chance of cool screenshots, is to create the currently mythical CL-Emacs. Daniel Barlow's suggestion was to start with portable hemlock, work out how to install it in a selection of free CL implementations, add features to taste, and graft the SLIME protocol onto it (replacing WIRE, which is how unportable Hemlock currently talks to CMUCL)

(In fact neither of these happened to any great extent, but we did admire Gilbert's CLIMified Portable Hemlock)

Lightning presentations

The format of a lightning presentation is probably negotiable, but in essence is as follows: 5 minutes. There will be time afterwards for questions/discussion; how much time depends on how we go. Informal proceedings are available.

Sign up here if you can give one or two:

Attendees

Topic: Conference