I'm using QuickLisp to load Common Lisp libraries. However, there are many libraries that all do similar things. For example, there are many libraries that all deal with parsing a CSV file.
Are there any resources you use to check which libraries meet your needs? How do you determine if a library is still being supported? Are there any heuristics short of visiting individual libraries's websites?
I'm aware of http://www.cliki.net/, which provides some recommendations.
There are two separate questions:
Are there any resources you use to check which libraries meet your needs?
I just use the library's official documentation, or quickdocs as mentioned earlier. I don't think there are any comparison tables between similar libraries. But you can always ask for help on #lisp on Freenode IRC network (since StackOverflow doesn't like questions like "What's the best CL library for parsing CSV?")
How do you determine if a library is still being supported? Are there any heuristics short of visiting individual libraries's websites?
If a library is on Quicklisp then it is supported. Unsupported libraries usually drop out soon enough. Xach (Quicklisp's developer and maintainer) makes sure that there is no library in Quicklisp which can't be built on a supported CL implementation.