[asdf-devel] ASDF traverse changed behavior?

[Faré]

Dear friends,

let's please focus on the technical problem and drop the nagging. We
all want the same thing: an ASDF that works for everyone, including
ECL, and ECL is not to be considered a mere client, but an integral
part of ASDF. And we all suffer from the same breakages that waste our
time. And so let's talk about solutions rather than about blame.

>From Juanjo's and Robert's descriptions, it seems to me that the
TRAVERSE API could be improved to satisfy everyone.

Maybe it's a matter of splitting TRAVERSE into parts, and allowing
these parts to recurse or not on dependencies depending on various
flags.

I think the main issue is being able to recurse within the scope of
some system or module or not: we want to be able to tell TRAVERSE
"here's a predicate or description that tells how far you go", maybe
recording on the side a queue of things that haven't been traversed
but need to be done nonetheless.

So, traverse would take as an additional argument some specifier for
the scope of the traversal (system, module, predicate, etc.), and
return multiple values: the list of inside ops (fully recursed into),
and the list of outside ops (not recursed into).

Would something like that help?

PS: Juanjo, if you can write a script that exercises your features
that we include in our test suite, we will be able to more easily
detect errors and fix them early with less aggravation.

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
Past is important in as much as it affects the future and as such only. — Faré