[asdf-devel] ASDF:OOS LOAD-OP :FORCE T and SBCL contribs

[Nikodemus Siivola]

2009/5/13 Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info>:

I remain confused on "what installer" -- but nevermind.

> I was also thinking "eugh" in response to that alternative.  So I

Just the be clear, the "eugh" did not apply to the first option, which
seems the most natural one to me.

> figured it might be desirable to allow an installer to take an upstream
> library, together with its .asd file, and modify only his/her version of
> find-system so that when <library>.asd was loaded, we would also look
> for (for example) <library>.install or <library>.config, and load those
> right after the .asd file to impose any necessary site-specific
> configuration.

I'm opposed to adding number of files responsible for the behaviour of
the system as long as there are alternatives. They make debugging
harder, and test case reproduction doubly so -- especially when they
can contain arbitrary code.

That said, I think perhaps adding umpteen methods to TRAVERSE is not
the right hammer here. Maybe a *READ-ONLY-SYSTEMS*, list, which it
would be easy to push things onto.

Alternatively, if complex configuration is wanted, I would propose a
hash-table mapping system names to asdf:configuration objects, and a
DEFINE-SYSTEM-CONFIGURATION macro to populate it -- population would
be done in initialization files (or lazy-loaded files via some hook if
one really has to.)

Cheers,

 -- Nikodemus