[asdf-announce] ASDF 2.30 released

Faré fahree at gmail.com
Wed Feb 20 23:55:04 UTC 2013


Dear Lisp hackers,

ASDF 2.30 is another stability release in preparation for ASDF 3.
Since 2.29, in addition to specific portability fixes for CCL and CMUCL,
it notably restores some backward compatible behavior for
syntax tables around loading .asd files, using mutable global tables,
instead of standard syntax tables.

Just like 2.29, 2.28 and 2.27 before it,
ASDF 2.30 is a pre-release of ASDF 3, an almost complete rewrite of ASDF,
and includes a vast number of improvements since ASDF 2.26.
        http://lists.common-lisp.net/pipermail/asdf-announce/2013-February/000014.html

We invite all implementation vendors to update to ASDF 2.30.

We also invite all implementations to make the standard *readtable*
and *print-pprint-dispatch* tables immutable,
with useful error messages when a modification is attempted.
See how the CLHS forbids conformant programs from modifying them:
http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/26_glo_s.htm#standard_readtable
http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/26_glo_s.htm#standard_pprint_dispatch_table
Such modification can only result in problems down the line for users,
and it would be nice if at least when SAFETY isn't 0, that were checked.
In some unspecified future, we'd like to revert to ASDF 2.29's behavior
of binding the syntax tables to their standard values, and then we hope
that most implementations will immediately catch misguided attempts
by users to modify them (SBCL is the only implementation enforced
immutability on both tables).

Many thanks to stassats and avodonosov for their help in testing ASDF
and helping make it more robust, more portable and more backward compatible.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be
skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended. — F. Bastiat




More information about the asdf-announce mailing list