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What has changed on common-lisp.net, newest first.

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2026

A live REPL on the front page

The session on the front page is now a real Common Lisp, running in a container on our own server, and everyone on the page shares it: what you type, the others see, and what someone defines, you can call. It starts each time by typing in the hello-world that used to be written there. "Open in a full console" next to it opens Emacs and SLIME, connected to the same Lisp, for longer work.

It is meant for building things together. It is also a shared space that anyone can break; when that happens it comes back clean on its own, or an admin starts it afresh. Nothing in it is kept, so take copies of what you want to keep. It runs SBCL today; Clozure CL and ECL are ready to take their turns, and so are other opening examples. Suggestions and examples are welcome as merge requests to the site (under clnet/deploy/repl/examples/).

Weekend skin, Libraries page

The Weekend "Hacker" skin is now off unless you ask for it. The Libraries page no longer lists individual libraries; its list had been a stale copy of Awesome Common Lisp. The page now links to Quicklisp, Ultralisp, Awesome Common Lisp, CLiki and a few others, sorted by when each was last updated, which the site looks up by itself. The old list is still at old.common-lisp.net.

A meeting room, with recording

As you may know, common-lisp.net hosts a video conference room that is always open: the commons. It is Jitsi Meet running on our own server, it needs no account and nothing installed, and it is there for anyone who wants to talk about Common Lisp. The room now offers a recording service. Recordings draw on the community pot (next item). Additional Jitsi rooms can be made by registered administrators by asking the admins to become a Jitsi admin.

The mite pot

The services on common-lisp.net that cost something to run (the agent and the builds at custom images, meeting recordings) are now paid for from one community "mite pot". A mite is the pot's unit, and mites are sold in bundles of varying sizes and currency amounts. Everyone who uses a paid service draws the pot down, and anyone can top it up. We hope most of those who draw on it will top it back up in time; some will not, and some will put in more than they use. Either way the payments go toward common-lisp.net's running costs, and we hope the services do some good for Common Lisp.

Custom images

Common-lisp.net now lets you order up a Docker container image with Common Lisp, configured how you need it. Go to custom images and fill in the form, or describe what you want to the assistant on the page (an bot that fills in the same form for you). Configurations generated from the form are free; because agent prompts and custom image builds and hosting consume resources, the site charges for these services against a community credits pool that can be topped up by anyone.

Skins, and a visitor count

The site has skins that you can choose from the palette button at the top of every page. These are experimental and meant for fun. Feel free to play around with them or try making your own, submit an MR with it if you'd like to share.

The footer of every page now shows a visitor count. It is counted on the server as each page is sent: no cookies, no scripts, no third party, and no addresses are stored. See README for details.

A new common-lisp.net

This site has been rewritten. It used to be static pages made by a generator; it is now a Common Lisp program that serves the pages itself. It works on a phone and has a dark theme. What is new for visitors: a form for asking for an account, which goes straight to the admins, and a page on what is being worked on. Every address of the old site still works, and the old site is kept as it was at old.common-lisp.net. The first version had a new design as well; after readers' comments, the look was brought back close to the old one on 2 October. If you have more suggestions, please open an issue.

Fresh container images, and Clozure CL on arm64

The container images of Common Lisp implementations that common-lisp.net publishes as clfoundation/* on Docker Hub as well as on our own container registry at containers.common-lisp.net have all been rebuilt: SBCL 2.6.9 (and a preview of 2.6.10), Clozure CL 1.13, ECL 26.5.5, ABCL 1.9.3, Clasp 3.0.1, CLISP 2.49.92, CMUCL 21f and Allegro CL 11.0 Express, on Debian trixie and bookworm. New this time: the 1.13.1-rc images of Clozure CL are built for linux/arm64 as well as amd64, from the development branch that received CCL's port to 64-bit ARM Linux on September 2nd. That port has no release yet, so treat it as experimental and please report what breaks. To try it: docker run --rm -it clfoundation/ccl:1.13.1-rc-trixie.

2025

European Lisp Symposium has just concluded and the Common Lisp Foundation is having a physical meeting after it to discuss priorities for the Foundation and the common-lisp.net website.

NOTE: The new host has stricter SSH key requirements than the old one, so for example older, weaker RSA keys may no longer work. We don't plan to enable support for legacy keys which are considered insecure by today's standards. If this appears to affect you, please generate a new keypair (RSA, ED25519) and send the public key to the clo-devel mailing list (which we assume you're already on if you had ssh access to the old host), or ask for support at the IRC channel noted in the previous News item.

The toplevel common-lisp.net domain (which you're presumably looking at right now) has been changed to point to our new host, the same as gitlab.common-lisp.net and future.common-lisp.net. Most ssh user accounts (with intact UIDs) and their home directories were copied to the new host in late December, 2024. If you need to synchronize any interim changes from the old host, you should be able to use rsync and you can access the old host with your existing ssh key at e.g. legacy.common-lisp.net (any default *.common-lisp.net is still pointing to the old host). You may need to update your ~/.ssh/config accordingly to point to the legacy hostname.

Gitlab has been moved to a new host. Other services will follow to this new host. Please update your remotes to use gitlab.common-lisp.net if they were using bare common-lisp.net previously. Follow discussion of server migration at the #common-lisp.net channel on libera.chat IRC.

2022

All project sites have moved from https://common-lisp.net/project/<project-name> to https://<project-name>.common-lisp.dev. The former now redirects to the latter, so bookmarks should continue to work. Additionally, we have added new content to our FAQs on how to deploy a website to https://<project-name>.common-lisp.dev, as well as use GitLab CI for testing and more complicated tasks.

20201 item

Mailing list archive clean-up: Since the inception of common-lisp.net, hosting of mailing lists has been part of our service offering. For a long time, two or even three mailing lists were created with every new project. Many of those were never used. Today, we cleared out all mailing list archives which didn't have any messages in them and which are not in active operation.

This cleanup should allow more effective browsing of the archives as 571 mailing lists without content are no longer part of the archive listing.

If you think we cleared out an archive in error, please let us know so we can restore.

20195 items

ABCL fundraiser!

The Common Lisp Foundation hosts an appreciation fundraiser for the ABCL project.

An appreciation fundraiser serves as a 'thank you' to those who have invested their (free) time in the project. It isn't intended as a 'bounty' for new functionality.

The Subversion repository maintenance window completed ahead of schedule at 18:00 on June 1st instead of taking the better part of the weekend. During this maintenance window, Subversion repositories were upgraded to the latest standard (1.9). Some repositories were stored in backward compatible formats as far back as 1.1. With the migration, repository access should benefit from performance work done in the server component. Other features that become available with this maintenance include the storage of merge-tracking information.

Thank you for your patience!

The site has always been running its own Trac setup, because we were one of the early Trac adopters. While running our own packages, we've also been lenient to install plugins. Due to improved support in both Trac as well as Debian packages, we were able to move to a full-standard setup.

These days, many of those plugins have been integrated into Trac or come pre-packaged from Debian. Others have lost their usefulness (OpenID support falls into this category as nobody seems to be supporting that anymore...).

For the common-lisp.net team this means we've been able to maintain both our liberal support for user-desired functionality of our Trac users as well as simplifying maintenance of our hosting infrastructure.

Thanks to the Trac team for their continued efforts!

On Sunday, April 28th, the common-lisp.net hosting infrastructure experienced an outage of approximately 5 hours when we encountered a unexpected difficulty in upgrading our services. As you know, we take our responsiblity towards the integrity of the data and services associated with common-lisp.net seriously. Part of that responsiblity is owning up to our mistakes, so here’s our deeper explanation of how we inadvertently impinged on the integrity of the main host file system.

While work was in progress on changes to set up support for better and faster restore from backup, if such was required, a small change was required on the main BTRFS filesystem: moving a snapshot from one place to another on the file system. This operation couldn't be performed while the system was online, so the VM was brought down.

After the VM was down, the main filesystem was mounted on the host system to perform the operation. After unmounting the filesystem and remounting it to verify the result, the filesystem at first wouldn't be mounted. After executing the btrfs rescue zero-log command, the filesystem did mount, but only in read-only mode.

Using a combination of the daily backups and the read-only filesystem, a new filesystem with the same content been created.

I'm very sorry for the incident in general and having your data at risk in particular. I haven't found any data-loss.

Erik Hulsmann common-lisp.net admin

ASDF fundraiser!

The Common Lisp Foundation hosts an appreciation fundraiser for the ASDF project, with up to $5,000 donation doubler.

An appreciation fundraiser serves as a 'thank you' to those who have invested their (free) time in the project. It isn't intended as a 'bounty' for new functionality.

20189 items

There was a short period of down time today in order to support an off-line reorganization of our file systems required to simplify and strengthen our backups and system maintenance tasks.

Our GitLab instance now has a more open account policy: users with a social login will be able to create an account without approval by an admin.

In order to support this openness, a more strict login policy has been put into place, requiring all users to log in using 2FA.

For those users who don't have a smartphone to install a 2FA app on, here's a c|net article how to do 2FA anyway

As announced on October 12, empty projects have been removed (archived) from the system. After further cleaning, the updated list consists of these 23 projects:

  • cl-amqp
  • cl-cactus-kev
  • cl-captcha
  • cl-gdbm
  • clint
  • cl-lazy-list
  • cl-lexer
  • clotnet
  • cl-player
  • cl-rundown
  • cltl3
  • decl
  • defmud
  • docutrack
  • israel-lisp
  • lisp-interface-library
  • mk-defsystem
  • movies
  • objective-cl
  • phorplay
  • same
  • trivial-features
  • umpa-lumpa

Intent to remove unused projects

As per the announcement, the site admins plan to remove the following list of projects which have been determined to neither have a project page nor a code repository. Please contact the site admins before October 26, 2018 to cancel project cleanup in case your project is wrongfully listed.

  • arxana
  • asdf-install
  • asdf-packaging
  • boston-lisp
  • chemboy
  • cl-amqp
  • cl-buchberger
  • cl-cactus-kev
  • cl-captcha
  • cl-clickatell
  • cl-gdbm
  • cl-gtk2
  • clint
  • cl-lazy-list
  • cl-lexer
  • cl-match
  • cl-ode
  • clotnet
  • cl-peg
  • cl-player
  • cl-rundown
  • cltl3
  • cl-yacc-ebnf
  • decl
  • defmud
  • docutrack
  • innen
  • israel-lisp
  • jess-parse
  • lisp-interface-library
  • mk-defsystem
  • movies
  • objective-cl
  • phorplay
  • same
  • sqlisp
  • tioga
  • trivial-features
  • trivial-shell
  • ucs-sort
  • umpa-lumpa
  • xml-psychiatrist

Today I found some time to enable GitLab's 'reply by e-mail' functionality.

When you receive a notification e-mail from our GitLab instance, you can now send a reply to that notification. If the notification was from an issue being updated, then your reply will update the issue with a follow-up commont.

A new version of Common-Lisp.net has been launched!

Among other things, the new site features:

  • A site generator implemented in Common Lisp.
  • A gitlab pipeline for automatic deployment.
  • A new responsive design based on Bootstrap and new content.

As per the announcement in August, the list of users with O/S level access has been cleaned up: those accounts which haven't been accessed since 2013 (and for which the owner didn't object to removal), have been removed. Home directories will be destructed to comply with GDPR regulations.

If you once had an account and you need your access restored, please contact our admins.

The Darcs (a distributed version control system before Git) repositories listed in our darcsweb instance have been converted to our GitLab instance. All use of Darcs on our site has been marked deprecated for a long time and we're happy to have found a way forward, keeping the repository content available to more modern VCSes.

20171 item
201524 items

Today the system has been declared "CVS clean"! All remnants of CVS have been removed.

On Friday, the system had performance problems due to slow I/O. Checking the S.M.A.R.T. parameters of the disks didn't show anything unusual. Today, the disk system reports running in degraded mode, so we ordered the failing disk to be replaced, causing only minor downtime. The disk array has been rebuilt and it's smooth sailing from here again!

Proposed approach for Darcs repository migration sent out.

The final batch of CVS projects has been migrated. None of the projects opted to move to Subversion, so all of them were migrated to Git+GitLab:

  • gamelib
  • ganelon
  • geometry
  • ginseng
  • glouton
  • gsharp
  • gtk-cffi
  • html-template
  • hyperdoc
  • hyperspec-lookup
  • ieeefp-tests
  • imago
  • iso8601-date
  • jnil
  • lambda-gtk
  • lgtk
  • lispfaq
  • lispy
  • lmud
  • log4cl
  • mcclim
  • meta-cvs
  • misc-extensions
  • morphologie
  • movitz
  • nio
  • noctool
  • pal
  • pg
  • phemlock
  • plain-odbc
  • rfc2388
  • rfc2822
  • rjain-utils
  • rucksack
  • sapaclisp
  • sb-simd
  • snmp1
  • spray
  • stamp
  • s-xml
  • s-xml-rpc
  • trivial-freeimage
  • unetwork
  • zip
  • zlib

Now that the CVS repositories have been migrated, we'll move to clean up the cvs services from the underlying box and preparations will start to migrate the Darcs repositories on the system. For progress on the Darcs repository migration, watch the clo-devel mailing list.

The next batch of CVS projects has been migrated. None of the projects opted to move to Subversion, so all of them were migrated to Git+GitLab:

  • cl-magick
  • cl-menusystem
  • cl-mp3-parse
  • closure
  • clouchdb
  • cl-plus-ssl
  • cl-ppcre
  • cl-prevalence
  • cl-rope
  • cl-sbml
  • cl-screen
  • cl-selenium
  • cl-semantic
  • cl-smogames
  • cl-smtp
  • cl-snmp
  • cl-soap
  • cl-store
  • cl-syslog
  • cl-telnetd
  • cl-utilities
  • cl-wav-synth
  • cl-who
  • cl-x86-asm
  • cl-xmms
  • cl-xmpp
  • corman-sdl
  • cparse
  • crypticl
  • cxml
  • defdoc
  • defeditor
  • definer
  • defplayer
  • defwm
  • eclipse
  • elephant
  • fetter
  • flexichain
  • fomus

The next batch of CVS projects has been migrated. None of the projects opted to move to Subversion, so all of them were migrated to Git+GitLab:

  • cinline
  • cl-blog
  • cl-carbon
  • cl-cli-parser
  • cl-cracklib
  • cl-dbf
  • cldoc
  • cl-enumeration
  • cl-fltk
  • cl-godb
  • cl-gsl
  • climacs
  • clim-desktop
  • cl-interpol
  • cl-ipc
  • cl-jpeg
  • cl-libtai

Migration of CVS repositories to Git+GitLab has started. The first batch (10 projects) was converted:

  • anaphora
  • aspiwork-pdm
  • bayescl
  • beep
  • beirc
  • bese
  • cello
  • cells
  • cells-gtk
  • cells-ode

In total there are 120 CVS repositories to convert. Project members receive an announcement mail in advance. CVS repositories which are left behind after conversion to another VC will be skipped and projects which are in such a situation are kindly requested to notify the admins of such situation - or even better: clean it up before the admins run into it. Now is your chance! :-)

The first projects with CVS repositories have received e-mails about the planned migration according to the proposed procedure. We're going in batches, using aphabetical order, so you may not have received e-mail for your projects yet. Don't dispair, it'll come!

The announcement e-mail requires action if you want to migrate to Subversion instead of to Git. If you want to migrate to Git+GitLab, there's no need to respond. It's the default.

If you want to declare that your project wants to migrate to Subversion without awaiting your announcement e-mail, please file a ticket in the site's Trac instance.

Due to a variety of reasons, the history of the mailing lists of common-lisp.net had spread over a number of sources:

  • the older system's mailman list manager's history (mbox format)
  • the intermediately used mlmmj list manager's history (spool directory, individual mails)
  • the new system's mailman list manager's history (mbox format)

With only the archives from the last bullet hosted in viewable form, valuable Common Lisp history and coding advice collected over the years has been unavailable for at least 9 months.

Now, this long-overdue task has finally been completed. The mailing list history can be browsed and indexed again from the online archive

Today we enabled project imports from GitHub. Should you want to import your project (which should import both the repository and the issues) into gitlab, please check out gitlab documentation for the github import workflow.

As part of the effort to enable GitHub imports, we had to do a minor GitLab upgrade. The current hosted GitLab version is now 7.9.1.

Another part of enabling GitHub imports was to allow users to log in on our site using their GitHub credentials. Please note that this will only work for those who already have a valid (i.e. pre-existing and confirmed) GitLab account. If you want to use this option (which is also available for Google accounts), please check the GitLab omniauth for existing users documentation.

Our self-hosted git repository management environment gitlab.common-lisp.net is now live! During the deployment, the system was seeded with 390 users, 434 groups and 210 repositories.

The deployment itself took little over an hour, while we were able to resolve the issues we identified after completion well within the migration timeframe of 4 hours. During this time, most services were fully available. Only SSH has been impacted shortly.

If you experience any issues, please report to the site admins.

We hope you enjoy the new user experience!

Today the date has been announced for the final migration of all git repositories to GitLab: Friday March 20th!

While testing the seeding scripts for the new GitLab site, a number of e-mails to live users have unintentionally been sent instead of held.

The content of the messages suggests one may be able to log in on the system. When trying so, the system denies access. This is a side effect of the testing setup. In the final migration run, you will receive an account confirmation mail. A mail not distributed in the test-run. Once the account is confirmed, the system will allow changing passwords and logging in.

We're sorry for any inconvenience caused.

The site admins have announced a change in policies for the mailing lists to be in effect as of March 15th, 2015. Please read the original announcement e-mail for details.

In summary, there are two changes being implemented:

  1. Subject prefix '[]' won't be added anymore.
  2. Moderation requests won't be held indefinitely anymore, defaulting to a hold period of 90 days (expiring the unmoderated e-mail when unhandled).

The former addresses problems with delivery of DKIM signed mail being sent through mailing lists. Changing the message headers and body may invalidate any prior DKIM signatures, leading to mailing list e-mail looking suspect to large mail receiving providers like Google and Yahoo!.

The later addresses the fact that the moderation queue is growing indefinitely, with most lists set to never expire moderation requests.

Due to a failed system upgrade, the system experienced extended downtime on Sunday. Our apologies for any inconvenience.

The maintenance was completed successfully around 18.00 UTC and is a step towards easier maintainance for the system and support the development of new and simplified configuration.

The (www.)common-lisp.net domain has started using the https protocol for all its URLs. In the weeks to come, the various sub-domains will be switched too. This change has been made in response to user requests. Should you have a request too, please let us know on the [mailing list](http://mailman.common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo /clo-devel)!

The mail system's criteria for accepting mail have been tightened and mail forwarding now uses SRS when the sender domain specifies an SPF policy. The changes address these issues:

  • too many spam mails entering the moderation queues
  • improved reputation of the common-lisp.net domain at Google

Google considers common-lisp.net a Bulk Sender, which means we must abide by a number of requirements to make sure mail gets accepted.

Some of the stricter criteria to accept mail on common-lisp.net are:

Mail failing SPF validation is no longer accepted.

Due to the SRS rewriting, these mails would leave common-lisp.net as legitimate mail. By rejecting these mails, we honor the policy stated by the sender domain.
Note: We're currently not rejecting soft-failing mails.

Mail failing DKIM validation is no longer accepted

Forwarding mail which fails DKIM validation reflects poorly on common-lisp.net's reputation as a mail host. By rejecting mail failing DKIM validation, we honor the policy stated by the sender domain.

A series of requirements on the host submitting mail

By enforcing a number of requirements on the DNS configuration and protocol conformity of the hosts submitting mail to common-lisp.net, we enforce the same requirements that Google and other mail hosters enforce on us, common-lisp.net can't be used as a hub by spammers to increase legitemacy of the mail flow. Nor can accidental forwarding of spam mail hurt common-lisp.net's reputation with the large mail hosters.

20141 item

Hello everybody. The site moved to a shiny new server a few moments ago. Everything should work, and if it doesn't, please let us know.

You can also help us by donating.

Something wrong or missing here? Edit this page on GitLab.