[armedbear-devel] ASDF2 in trunk

[Mark Evenson]

I've committed a snapshot of ASDF2 [in trunk][1], including [a copy of 
the texinfo manual][2].

[1]: http://trac.common-lisp.net/armedbear/changeset/12618
[2]: 
http://trac.common-lisp.net/armedbear/browser/trunk/abcl/doc/asdf/asdf.texinfo

A potential gotcha for moving from ASDF: there is a translation 
mechanism for FASL locations in place by default (this code supersedes 
the ASDF-BINARY-LOCATIONS addon), so your FASLs end up in a central FASL 
cache by default.

This output mechanism is *very* configurable, see the manual for 
examples.  To totally disable output translations, one can simply eval

      (asdf:disable-output-translations)

after loading ASDF2.

With output translations, one may have the problem with code that 
wrangles *LOAD-TRUENAME* or *LOAD-PATHNAME* to get the source directory. 
  The official ASDF2 recommendation is to rewrite your code to use 
ASDF:SYSTEM-RELATIVE-PATHNAME, possibly utilizing the presence of :ASDF2 
in *FEATURES* to conditionalize old code.  Examples of such definitions 
can be found in my patch as I adapted our ASDF definitions for test code.

We still have to solve the problem arising from the possibility of not 
having a writable filesystem in an applet or servlet context, but that 
problem was present with the old ASDF as well.

Anyone with problems in using ASDF2 please let me know.  I have tested 
it quite a bit in the past months finding it generally much improved. 
The ASDF group is quite active in fixing things, so please be vocal and 
we should be able get you to a stable state.

-- 
"A screaming comes across the sky.  It has happened before, but there
is nothing to compare to it now."