[asdf-devel] Bizarre consequences of FIND-SYSTEM in ASDF.

[Robert Goldman]

Daniel Herring wrote:
> On Sun, 29 Nov 2009, Robert Goldman wrote:
> 
>> Can you explain how you got hold of McCLIM and CL-Utilities?  I'd be
>> interested in seeing if I can replicate this, but I haven't used McCLIM
>> in years, and back in those dark days we used only CVS (and we walked to
>> school barefoot, uphill /both ways/).  Maybe provide git urls for both
>> mcclim and cl-utilities?
> 
> For McCLIM, I'd just use the last release or try asdf-install.
> http://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/downloads/mcclim-0.9.6.tar.gz
> They also have a nightly CVS snapshot.
> http://common-lisp.net/cvs_tarballs/mcclim.tar.gz
> 
> Cl-utilities has had no commits after the latest tarball.
> http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cl-utilities/cl-utilities-latest.tar.gz
> 
> 
>> I'm actually surprised to see that cl-utilities wants to load the swank
>> asdf definition, too....
> 
> It was McCLIM that wanted swank (IIRC for a simple IDE).  Cl-utilities 
> requires sb-rotate-byte.
> 

OK, I'm confused.  Why is what we see here unusual?  I'm looking at the
transcript and what seems to happen is that SG initially causes the
various and sundry McCLIM sysdefs to be loaded (they are all in
mcclim.asd), and then asks for the cl-utilities asdf definition to be
loaded.

>From there I don't see anything particularly odd in the transcript.  We
get CL-UTILITIES, a boatload of CLIM systems, and SWANK.  SWANK is
imperatively loaded by McCLIM.  The CLIM systems are all defined in
mcclim.asd, which has been loaded by an SBCL initarg.

So what's weird here?  What's the seemingly-unrelated software that we
are looking up?  is it esa-mcclim?  I don't know about this because
esa-mcclim.asd is not in the mcclim release tarball.

If the objection is that the mcclim.asd file contains a boatload of
other system definitions, I don't see what that has to do with ASDF
proper.  That seems like a mcclim issue.

Best,
r