Reading
Bill Clementson's blog pointed me to Edi Weitz new
STARTER-PACK Lisp package, which tries to overcome one of Common Lisp perceived entry level problems for newcomers, when compared to e.g. Python. Python is known to come with "batteries included" which actually means that you'll have lots of libraries for everyday problems installed out of the box. For Common Lisp, not much has been accomplished in this area, as most people still seem to be debating on
comp.lang.lisp about standarization. Edi's starter pack instead does the right thing: It provides a simple selection of common packages, some of which could be called to have achieved de-facto standard level (e.g. his own CL-PPCRE package). Unfortunately, it's for Windows and Lispworks only, which Bill ported to Mac/LW.
Being a Debian user since many years (should be roughly ten years now), I think that it would be fairly simple to achieve something similar (but not at all comparable) to STARTER-PACK. There are already a lot of Common Lisp packages in Debian, what's missing, however, is a CL-TASK package. Such a package could do what all other task-* packages do in Debian: Have dependencies on the most common packages. This would provide at least a starting point for the newbies with CL in Debian. I think, I'm going to discuss this with Peter van Eynde via mail and also on cll.
