[asdf-devel] Enforcing pure *.asd files

[Tobias C. Rittweiler]

Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll
<juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> writes:

> 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.

I suggest that the Manual contains a few notes on Style, perhaps as an
FAQ. The notes should also explain why pureness in .asd is worthwhile.
I'll submit a bug entry for this.

Also FAQ 12.5.1 "How can I cater for unit-testing in my system?", does
not actually fully show how to add unit-testing in pure style; it shows
the IN-ORDER for the FOO system, but does not show how to actually
invoke the RUN-TESTS (or whatever) in the FOO-TEST system. I'll submit a
bug entry for this, too.


There, however, seems to be an inherent dependency-vs-pureness problem
with user extensions as illustrated by cffi-grovel; from [1]:

  ;;; CFFI-Grovel is needed for processing grovel-file components
  (cl:eval-when (:load-toplevel :execute)
    (asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op 'cffi-grovel))
   
  (asdf:defsystem example-software
    :depends-on (cffi)
    :serial t
    :components
    ((:file "package")
     (cffi-grovel:grovel-file "example-grovelling")
     (:file "example")))

I know Stelian cursed about this in-persona, wishing for a reader which
has a notion of unresolved-symbols.

  -T.


[1] http://common-lisp.net/project/cffi/manual/html_node/Groveller-ASDF-Integration.html#Groveller-ASDF-Integration