*patches*

The value of this variable is alist witch the keys being keywords that describe the patch category and the values being lists describing the individual patches loaded into the image. For a patch file to be noticed, it must contain a defpatch form. All official Allegro CL patches contain such a form.

The values in the alist are (as said above) themselves lists, with four elements:

1. A string providing the name of the patch that an attempt was made to load.
2. The version of the patch (an integer).
3. A string providing a short description of the patch.
4. nil if the patch was loaded sucessfully or a string explaining why it was not loaded.

Most patch names are encoded with the first letter indicating the release, the second the area in Lisp affected, and so on. Here is an example of several entries (you may not see these exact patches and the first letter, m, means release 10.1 as at the time this document was written version 10.1 had no patches), first some :compiler patches and then a few :lisp patches:

((:compiler ("mb015" 1 "Fix tail funcall for large-stack functions." nil)
  ("mb014" 1 "Fix esoteric compilation failure of gc-info." nil)
  ("mb013" 1 "Fix array creation with fixnum-returning dimension function."
   nil)
  ("mb012" 1 "Add source-debug-info for defmethod forms." nil)
  ("mb011" 1 "Fix source-level-debug generation for (setf values)." nil)
  ("mb010" 1 "Fix source-level-debug block placement." nil)
  ("mb009" 1 "Fixes a bug in source-level-debugging related to handler-case."
   nil)
  ("mb008" 1 "Fix two source debug info compile bugs." nil)
  ("mb007" 1
   "bitwise `and' operations compile into more efficient code on intel chips."
   nil)
  ...)
 (:lisp ("ma041" 1 "Speed up and enhance vector sorts." nil)
  ("ma040" 1 "Fix declarations return from sys:function-information." nil)
  ("ma039" 1 "Add excl::without-syncsig-trap to support test suites." nil)
  ("ma038" 1 "Fix count and count-if when looking from-end an lists." nil)
  ("ma037" 1 "Fix a timing window for asegv when changing class in smp lisps."
   nil)
  ...)

Note particularly the last value of the four in the individual patch lists: nil if the patch was loaded sucessfully. All these patches were loaded. If the load was unsuccessful, there would be a string explaining why it was not loaded. If the last value is not nil, the patch was not loaded and whatever it is designed to fix/change is unfixed/unchanged.

The identifying letter of the 10.1 version is m.

Copyright (c) 1998-2022, Franz Inc. Lafayette, CA., USA. All rights reserved.
This page was not revised from the 10.0 page.
Created 2019.8.20.