Ok, so I see the following points. (Correct me if I'm wrong)
(1) If sys-proclaim.lisp disagrees with the actual contents of the
source tree, things can break on GCL.
(2) An accurate sys-proclaim.lisp significantly improves performance on
GCL.
(3) sys-proclaim.lisp is (theoretically) generated automatically from
the source tree
(4) Since most of the devs don't develop on GCL, the version of
sys-proclaim.lisp checked into the repository is rather out of
date.
My suggestion: Why don't we change the GCL build so that we
automatically generate sys-proclaim.lisp on the initial build. We could
add a configure flag --with-sys-proclaim / --without-sys-proclaim. It
would default to being "with". The only disadvantage is that this would
double the build time from a clean tree: build once to make
sys-proclaim.lisp; build again with it. (Although this is less painful
if you have ccache installed, which was a nice surprise for me!)
I think that most users of the GCL build are on Windows installing
binaries anyway, so they won't see anything different. Developers would
no longer be able make the mistake that both Andreas and I (at least!)
made. And we'd remove an automatically generated non-human-readable file
From the repostiory, which is always nice.
Does this sound like it'd be a good solution? If so, I'll sit down and
write some patches.
Rupert
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