I'm happy to announce a new release of Clon, the Command-Line Options Nuker for standalone Common Lisp executables. In addition to a lot of uninteresting code and infrastructure changes, this new release comes with several important improvements and new features.

At the end-user level

• there is a new error handler available via the --clon-error-handler option, called "interactive". This error handler provides the same restarts as the one called "none" (which actually triggers the Lisp debugger), but in a less frightening way for end-users not knowing about Lisp at all. In particular, the error and restart messages are more readable and you don't see a Lisp stack anywhere. See the end-user manual and the user manual for more information.
• there is a new option called --clon-lisp-information which, as its name suggests, provides information about the underlying Lisp (implementation type and version). This will in fact be more useful for developers than for end-users, but it's still and end-user level feature. See the end-user manual for not much more information.

At the user-level

• Clon now provides a command-line polling API through the functions cmdline-options-p and cmdline-p. See the user manual for more information.
• Support for using Clon interactively, that is, without dumping executables has been improved. This is mostly useful for debugging purposes. See the user manual for more information.
• Clon now provides a compile-time / run-time unified configuration facility thanks to a variable named cl-user::com.dvlsoft.clon.configuration that is handled before the ASDF system is loaded. Thanks to this, Clon is now able to communicate its own indentation information to (X)Emacs directly (thanks to a process that I've previously described here), and also handles portability problems in a smoother way (see below).
• One of the available configuration options is called :restricted mode. In this mode, Clon never attempts to communicate with ttys via ioctl calls, at the expense of terminal autodetection (size and highlighting). This is implemented by making a termio ASDF module conditionally loaded in the system definition. There are cases where Clon will switch to restricted mode automatically (e.g. when using CLISP compiled without FFI support). However, some other situations are more problematic, for instance when using SBCL under MinGW, in which case the SB-GROVEL module is available but doesn't work. In such situations, it is necessary to configure Clon explicitely for restricted mode before loading the system. See the user manual for more information.

That's it. Grab it at the usual place. Yesterday, I realized that it's been slightly more than a year since the b19 release. Gee, time flies like the wind...