[asdf-devel] asdf-utilities

[Lou Vanek]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 11:10 AM, Faré <fahree at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11 October 2010 09:19, Lou Vanek <lou.vanek at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm setting up a new lisp system on a new debian lenny machine and one
>> of the lisp libraries
>> I'm trying to load is asking to load the asdf-utilities package, but
>> this package doesn't exist.
>>
>> Was this included with ASDF1 and not ASDF2? If so, how do people
>> work around those libraries that require asdf-utilities?
>>
>> I'm using the latest version of openmcl/clozure/ccl from trunk.
>> The asdf version that loads is 2.009. I believe asdf is included with ccl.
>> Appreciate any ideas.
>
> Sorry, it's a bug introduced in ASDF2, then resolved in ASDF2.
>
> I introduced ASDF-UTILITIES some time before ASDF 2.000, as a
> replacement for the ill-fated ASDF-EXTENSIONS, before I realized that
> ASDF-EXTENSIONS had never been used in ASDF1 anyway (didn't export
> anything), and that the demand from the public was to leave utilities
> in ASDF and not have extra packages (bug 620579), which was fixed in
> 2.006, with various attempts at enhancing backwards compatibility in
> 2.007, 2.008, 2.009.
>
> Apparently, this was a big fail, and you need to remove FASLs compiled
> with versions of ASDF earlier than 2.006 if any of them uses internal
> ASDF utilities. My apologies for the big mess.
>
> If FASL compatibility is required, maybe I should make ASDF-UTILITIES
> a nickname for ASDF? Or maybe I should display a prominent warning or
> cerror if ASDF-UTILITIES existed and was deleted? What do you think?

Either a prominent warning or comprehensive error message would have
saved me about 2 hours
of Googling and would have let me compile my project a day earlier
on this new machine. One vote here for some kind of notification.

FASL compatibility isn't required by me -- I just assumed that since I
had properly
set up SBCL to automatically recompile stale fasls that I had done the same
for clozure, which I just figured out I did not. My bad.


> [ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
> The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.

Thanks for the explanation. All is well now.

Lou Vanek