[asdf-devel] Replace *DEFAULT-PATHNAME-DEFAULTS*

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info>
writes:

> I think that this change may be annoying to Unix[1] *users* who start up
> their lisp from the shell, and who have expectations about how their
> lisp implementation is going to set the *default-pathname-defaults* from
> the current working directory.

In my understanding, Thomas is not proposing to change
*default-pathname-defaults* but to define another variable, specific to
ASDF.

In my mind, *default-pathname-defaults* is a user variable: the user may
change it as he wants for whatever purpose he wants.  For example, I
have cd/pwd/pushd/popd functions that maintain the synchronicity between
*default-pathname-defaults* and the current working directory on POSIX
systems.

It would be bad if the user changing *default-pathname-defaults* for
whatever purpose unrelated to asdf would impact the behavior of asdf.

An example, was a bug in clisp, where (require "module") could not find
the its module anymore when *default-pathname-defaults* was changed.


I don't see how not using *default-pathname-defaults*, after perhaps an
initialization, you can have:
(defvar asdf:*pathname-defaults* (truename *default-pathname-defaults*))
would break unix users expectations.  When I want to load an asd file
from some directory, be it the current directory, I push it onto
asdf:*central-registry*, I don't mess with *default-pathname-defaults*.


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.