How to fix asdf error when using buildapp on a quicklisp project

Question

I've been making my first quicklisp project lately and I wanted to share it. I've put it on github, but not everyone has emacs + slime + quicklisp installed so I wanted to make an executable I could put with the code.

To do this I'm using buildapp and following the steps laid out in this stackoverflow answer.

$ sbcl --no-userinit --no-sysinit --non-interactive \
       --load ~/quicklisp/setup.lisp \
       --eval '(ql:quickload "ltk-colorpicker")' \
       --eval '(ql:write-asdf-manifest-file "quicklisp-manifest.txt")'

$ buildapp --output out \
           --manifest-file quicklisp-manifest.txt \
           --load-system ltk-colorpicker \
           --entry colorpicker

After running those commands I get the following error:

Fatal INPUT-ERROR-IN-LOAD:
  READ error during LOAD:

    The symbol "*SYSTEM-DEFINITION-SEARCH-FUNCTIONS*" is not external in the ASDF/FIND-SYSTEM package.

      Line: 16, Column: 90, File-Position: 15267

      Stream: #<SB-INT:FORM-TRACKING-STREAM for "file /home/nathan/quicklisp/local-projects/ltk-colorpicker/dumper-2SKVI5f7.lisp" {1001B70F83}>

The main problem here is that I don't even have a clue at how to begin to fix it. I've seen this gibhub issue, but that had to do with problems with Homebrew and it never even mentions buildapp . It's all very confusing. And I hope I could get some help.

Thanks in advance for any answers.

Answer 1

I can reproduce the error. As suggested in the comments, you can build an up-to-date version of buildapp as follows:

$ sbcl
* (ql:quickload :buildapp)
...

* (buildapp:build-buildapp 
    (merge-pathnames "bin/buildapp" (user-homedir-pathname)))

This build $HOME/bin/buildapp . When I use the new binary, there is no error anymore.

You can also avoid generating an executable (that can end up being outdated) by systematically calling the buildapp::main function from Common Lisp; you will then always have the version that corresponds to the current release of quicklisp:

* (buildapp::main 
    '("BUILDAPP" ;; argv[0] must exist but the value is not important
      "--manifest-file" "/tmp/quicklisp-manifest.txt" 
      "--load-system" "drakma" "--output" "/tmp/test"))

Answer 2

Some extra info from my point:

The solution was to use the newest version of buildapp as @coredump mentioned. I updated by going to the github page , downloading the zip and doing the following commands at the point where buildapp is stored.

$ make
$ cp buildapp /usr/bin

(This of course only works on linux.) This is not an elegant solution but buildapp hasn't updated in 4 years, I think it's a safe enough bet. I also made a mistake with the command. The --entry part is wrong. It should have been: `--entry ltk-colorpicker::main`` where main is a function that takes one variable since that's required by the spec .

Main is just this: (main (i) (declare (ignore i)) (colorpicker))