*PACKAGE* rebound by debugger

[Barry Margolin <barmar@THINK.COM>]

There's a piece of behavior of the Genera that has been bothering many
users here for a long time.  We've been complaining about it since at
least 7.0.  We developed a kludgey patch around it, but since we just
discovered that the patch didn't work in 7.2 (all the references to
ZL:PACKAGE had to be changed to *PACKAGE*), they've started bugging me
about it.  I'm CCing SLUG to find out whether other users find this
behavior obnoxious.

The complaint is that when you get an error during loading a file,
*PACKAGE* is generally bound by the debugger to something like CL-USER,
rather than being left bound to the package the file was being loaded
into.  The files have packages in their attribute lists and also contain
IN-PACKAGE as their first form.

The same thing also happens if the user uses IN-PACKAGE interactively to
change his default package rather than the :Set Package command or
ZL:PKG-GOTO.

This automatic rebinding of *PACKAGE* makes it a pain to debug, because
you have to use package prefixes to reference all the variables of the
program that failed.  IN-PACKAGE is the standard Common Lisp function
for changing the default package.

The workaround patch some of our users use is:

(setq si:*standard-bindings*
      (delete '*package* si:*standard-bindings* :key #'car))

(si:advise-permanently si:setq-standard-value-2 :around package-hack nil
  (if (and (eq (car arglist) '*package*)
	   (packagep (cadr arglist)))
      (setq *package* (cadr arglist))
      :do-it))

Is this behavior intentional or have you just not gotten around to
fixing it?  I've tried to justify it to my users, with arguments like
"it's trying to pretend that default packages are associated with I/O
streams" (I've long believed that reader/printer options such as
*READ-BASE*, *PRINT-ARRAY*, and *READTABLE* should be able to be
specified when opening a character stream, and have those be the
defaults when doing I/O to the stream), but they don't buy it.  All they
see, and I can understand their point, is that they need to debug a
program that was loading into the *LISP package, and they've been pulled
arbitrarily into the CL-USER package.

                                                barmar