[asdf-devel] ASDF 2.0 and beyond.

[Robert Goldman]

On 4/18/10 Apr 18 -10:48 AM, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 12:20 AM, Faré <fahree at gmail.com
> <mailto:fahree at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     PS: after 2.0 is out, I'd like to resign from ASDF maintainership, to
>     focus on XCVB (help welcome on that, too). Is anyone volunteering to
>     replace me on ASDF?
> 
> 
> After thinking about it, I am willing to step up as a possible
> replacement. The reasons why I would go that far are
....
> Among my goals would be to implement a faster development model that is
> based on a more agile dialogue
> * Feature is proposed with a model implementation
> * Arguments in pro/cons in the list
> * Implementation committed only to an asdf-devel branch or to a personal
> repo.
> * Verification that all relevant software builds
> * Iterate from (2)
> * Repeat until enough features grant a push to master and a release.

For what it's worth, I'm happy to see an agile development, but I would
strongly discourage implementation as the main way of introducing new
features.

>From my experiences working on the ASDF documentation and the innards of
TRAVERSE, one of the hardest things about working on ASDF is that there
is no clear, written down description of what ASDF /should/ do.

I'm sure it may seem that having a spec might make this less agile, but
on more reflection, I believe that the community would see that this is
not the case.  Right now, the only way to get started working on ASDF is
to read a great deal of code, and understand a number of subtleties and
oddities about how ASDF functions now.  If there was, for example, a
clear description of the plan-generation function that is implemented in
TRAVERSE, it would be a lot easier for someone to start working on it.
I can speak from hard experience!  Similarly, now Faré has given it the
once-over, but we have no very good way of comparing old and new
behaviors and determining which (if any!) is correct, because we have no
criteria for what it means for TRAVERSE to be "correct."

ASDF is central enough to the entire Lisp community, that it deserves a
specification.  Perhaps at the ILC or a Euro Lisp Symposium we could
have a workshop on ASDF and its future.

Best,
r