Sharing of LISP jobs.

[ELLEN at MIT-MC (V. Ellen Lewis)]

May I add my 2 cents worth?  What are we worried about?  LISP per
se is hardly ever run on MC.  The only thing, and I guess the thing
JLK is concerned about, that runs in LISP is the GLPTR.  This is
a system for MACSYMA, after all.  There is a file on LIBLSP or LIBDOC
called LOCK > which has a record of what version of LISP things run in.
MACSYMA is listed therein.  Users do not dump out subsystems on this system,
hackers do.  Hackers should have no trouble explicitly loading a LISP
version (even I know how to do that!).  So the people who dump out GLPTR
should dump it in the same version MACSYMA is dumped in.  Since MACSYMAs
are created only with reasonable frequency, the number of times a GLPTR
needed to be redumped to match MACSYMA would be minimal.  Not dumping
out MACSYMAs very often is good policy from a User point of view, since
(modulo the need for bug fixes) Users like something that does not change.
PUlling the rug out from underneath users every week or so is obviously
not a good thing.  And as one further note, JM has told me several times
that what really slows MC down with swapping is not MACSYMA but the text
editors.
(maybe that was 6 cents worth).