comm.lisp rev 1.39 issue?



I've been building maxima with a soon-to-be-released version of cmucl,
the tests fail.  First first test in rtest6a fails because $dependencies
is somehow set to ((mlist simp) 0 . 0), which is not a proper list.

I don't understand why this happens with this new version or how
$dependencies becomes that.

But looking at comm.lisp, I notice that currently i-$dependencies has:

(unless (cdr $dependencies)
  (setq $dependencies '((mlist simp))))

But the previous rev (1.38) has:

(unless (cdr $dependencies)
  (setq $dependencies (copy-list '((mlist simp)))))

I think in the current version '((mlist simp)) is a constant, and it is
destructively modified during processing of dependencies.   The previous
version seems to recognize this and makes a copy.  With this change,
cmucl works as expected.

Any one know why this particular change was made?

I'm inclined to put back the original.

Ray