[asdf-devel] Enforcing pure *.asd files

[Faré]

On 18 March 2010 16:41, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll
<juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> wrote:
> This is an idea that has been long floating in the back of my mind, and was
> brought back to life by these comments
>    http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/f99a69797eda1caf
>
> The problem is that many people use *.asd files to do things like building
> up packages, creating operations, defining methods, etc. That makes it
> impossible to ship those libraries because the side effects are not recorded
> in the system itself. So if ECL traverses the system to build a standalone
> program it will know which sources are required, but those sources may for
> instance rely on a package that was created in the *.asd definition.
>
> My suggestion is a gradual move towards enforcing that *.asd files become
> mere descriptions of the system and that side effects needed for building
> and loading are listed in the system itself.
>
What about instead investing in XCVB?

Such enforcement will necessarily introduce backward incompatibility and pain,
which I think goes contrary to the goals of ASDF.

XCVB, on the other hand, is designed to pretty much do what you ask for:
have system descriptions be pure information manipulated by an external
process without uncontrolled side-effects.

As to systems that currently use weird ASDF extensions,
you could either make XCVB's ASDF converter better,
or just convert these systems by hand.

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