[asdf-devel] defsystem behaviour

[Faré]

On 14 September 2010 16:21, Daniel Barlow <dan at telent.net> wrote:
> Apologies for the complete lack of references headers in this mail, but
> I'm not subscribed to asdf-devel and only see this message in the
> common-lisp.net archive.
>
> On 9/13/10 Sep 13 -8:05 AM, Serhiy Yakovyn wrote:
>  > Is this done intentionally?
>
> Robert Goldman rpgoldman at sift.info wrote:
>  > Yes, this is done intentionally.  Canonical (i.e., what you get when you
>  > translate a symbol) names for ASDF systems (and other ASDF components)
>  > are downcased.
>
>  > I /suspect/ (I am not privy to the intentions of the original developer)
>  > that this is because the downcased names --- this policy is applied not
>  > just to systems, but to other components as well --- map better to the
> way people use modern file-systems.
>
> This is, or was once, or should be, a matter of record.  I don't know
> where asdf is currently hosted nor how far back the revision history
> there goes, but if you look at a sufficiently ancient version of
> asdf/README you should find something like
>
> 122  *** Component Attributes
> 123
> 124     **** A name (required)
> 125
> 126     This is a string or a symbol.  If a symbol, its name is taken and
> 127     lowercased.  The name must be a suitable value for the :name initarg
> 128     to make-pathname in whatever filesystem the system is to be found.
> 129
> 130     The lower-casing-symbols behaviour is unconventional, but was selected
> 131     after some consideration.  Observations suggest that the type of
> 132     systems we want to support either have lowercase as customary case
> 133     (unix, mac, windows) or silently convert lowercase to uppercase
> 134     (lpns), so this makes more sense than attempting to use :case :common,
> 135     which is reported not to work on some implementations
>
Thanks, Dan. I committed these paragraphs to the current ASDF manual.

And -- thanks a whole lot for ASDF and your other CL hacks.

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