Today, I'm releasing the next beta version of Clon, my command-line options management library.

The previous official release occurred 6 years ago. Since then, a number of changes had been quietly sleeping in the trunk but never made their way into Quicklisp. More recently, I have also applied a number of changes that are worth mentioning here.

First of all, a large part of the infrastructure as been updated, following the evolution of the 8 supported compilers, and that of ASDF and CFFI as well. This should normally be transparent to the user though, provided that one uses reasonably recent compiler / ASDF version ("reasonably" intentionally left undefined). Other than that...

• The constraints on termio support auto-detection had become slightly too restrictive, so they have been relaxed.
• The exit function has been deprecated in favor of uiop:quit.
• The support for running in scripts rather than in dumped executables has been improved, notably by offering the possibility to provide an alternate program name when argv0 is not satisfactory.
• Clon is now compatible with executables dumped via ASDF's program-op operation, or dumped natively. The demonstration programs in the distribution have been updated to illustrate both dumping methods (ASDF, and Clon's dump function).
• The documentation on application delivery has been largely rewritten, and has become a full chapter rather than a thin appendix.

There are also a few bug fixes in this release.

• Several custom readtable problems have been fixed for CCL, CLISP, and ECL (thanks to Thomas Fitzsimmons). Note that Clon depends on named-readtables now.
• Clon now compiles its termio support correclty with a C++ based ECL (thanks to Pritam Baral).
• One problem in the conversion protocol for path options has been corrected (thanks to Olivier Certner).

All entrey points are on Clon's web page.

Enjoy!