toggling :colon-mode in already created packages?

[barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)]

    Date: Sun, 15 Dec 1991 20:27 EST
    From: starnet!bass!lakin@apple.com (Fred Lakin)

    I still have a lot of old data files with single colon pkg prefixes;
    I know in advance when I am about to read one. 

    What I would like is to toggle the :colon-mode in the relevent pkgs to
    T just to read in the files, then toggle back to nil so the files can
    be written out with modern colon syntax.

    Is this possible without destroying the pkgs? rebuilding 'em while 
    still afloat so to speak ...

(si:make-package-more <package> :colon-mode :external)

should do what you want.  Needless to say, this is neither portable, nor
even guaranteed to work in future releases.  But it sounds as if this is
a one-time process where you'll be fixing all your data files, so you
should be pretty safe.

A portable way would be to create a new package with the standard colon
mode, copy all the attributes and symbols from the old package to the
new one, rename it to the old package's name, and change all the use
links to refer to the new package.

                                                barmar