[asdf-devel] Should ASDF define many packages?

[Faré]

On 20 August 2010 04:32, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll
<juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Faré <fahree at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think the too-many-packages problem is not worth wasting time. I would
> rather be interested on a _simpler_ bootstrapping process, which can be used
> by implementations shipping ASDF. I mean, given that ASDF is not loaded,
> being able to skip all the code related to clever renaming of packages,
> interning / uninterning symbols, etc.
>
I merged all the packages back into ASDF. Some consider it a good
thing, some consider it a bad thing. I don't care anymore; if someone
does care, he better accept maintainership of that part of the code.

This merge did simplify this somewhat. But the code already was and
remains "clever" in not doing any unnecessary uninterning.

> On reading your replies to the bug report, I appreciate you do not find it
> essential that implementations ship the latest version of ASDF, or that at
> least users should not rely on it.
>
Yes, that was essential to our ASDF 2 strategy. That doesn't mean we
don't recommend implementors to ship with the latest. We *do* beg
vendors to always ship with the latest; at the very least to ship with
*some* version of ASDF 2. But we don't rely on it.

> Nevertheless, I believe it would be interesting to rescue the idea of
> issuing periodic announcements of milestone releases that implementations
> should include. Not as verbose as the ASDF2 letter, but at least one email
> pointing out: hey, include this.
>
Once in a while, I try to send something to each implementation's
mailing-list. I get precious little replies (and none at all from
commercial vendors, except for SCL and long ago a now-expired
Lispworks test license).

> Alternatively, I would contemplate the possibility of including a
> configuration step in ECL that downloads the latest ASDF. That would be
> easy, just looking for the existence of internet connection + wget/curl, but
> we would need a stable and permanent address for ASDF files to be
> downloaded. I mean individual files, not really a tarball.
>
I wrote a script to do just that in sbcl's contrib/asdf. They didn't
get my latest version, but here's the Makefile target, that you can
tailor to your needs:

up:
        if [ -d asdf-upstream ] ; then \
        cd asdf-upstream ; git checkout release ; git reset --hard
release ; git pull -a ; else \
        git clone --branch release \
        git://common-lisp.net/projects/asdf/asdf.git asdf-upstream ; fi
        cp asdf-upstream/asdf.lisp asdf.lisp
        cp asdf-upstream/doc/asdf.texinfo asdf.texinfo
        cp asdf-upstream/README README
        cd asdf-upstream ; make archive
        cp asdf-upstream/LICENSE LICENSE

Thanks a lot for your support!

PS: still no ECL support in XCVB. Sorry.


[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. Then you win.
        — Gandhi