[asdf-devel] Bootstrapping asdf

[Daniel Herring]

On Wed, 3 Feb 2010, Robert Goldman wrote:

> "The best is the enemy of the good." --- Voltaire

So far, I have only written about pragmatically solved problems.  Do you 
really want to hear what I think might be best?  ;)


> There seems to be a strong sentiment from at least part of this mailing
> list that ASDF loading should be reorganized so that some minimal core
> functionality is loaded, and more can be loaded on demand.
>
> I'd like to go on record as opposing this.  I see the arguments for
> tidiness involved, but I think there are some powerful arguments against
> doing this:
...

Compared to make or autotools or cmake or bjam or ... ASDF is very small 
in functionality, footprint, etc.  Except for users having trouble 
finding docs, it is also rather easy to install.

Here's an approach that would make a lot of sense and solve numerous 
backward-compatibility issues.  The full ASDF toolset may be big and hard 
to install [see below].  But a simple command drops a self-contained file 
customized for a particular system.  Thus end users don't even have to 
install ASDF to use it!

This approach also solves the bootstrap issue -- users can bootstrap using 
the full functionality of ASDF.  So it actually installs just like any 
other library.

- Daniel

P.S.  Any similarity to the configure.ac -> configure transform is purely 
accidental.  ;)