[asdf-devel] New ASDF maintainer sought

[Vsevolod Dyomkin]

Hi,

I have spent some time this year familiarizing myself with ASDF, and
afterwards I think, that it's a great build-tool (possibly, the best one
around, actually), which has a lot of hidden potential.  So I'd be willing
to help as the maintainer or one of the maintainers.

But there's more to maintaining ASDF, than to other projects, as it is a
critical part of every Lisp environment.  That's why I think it would be
best to have a separate Release manager (performing most duties of
maintainer), and separate people, who will take decision about feature
requests.  There are two possible models here: benevolent dictator
and committee.  Both have their drawbacks, but dictator model can only work
with the original author, so it's not applicable here.  Speaking about
committee model, I think that it should be formed by the representatives of
most of all Lisp implementations, as well as Release manager and possibly
other people who were heavily involved in ASDF development, all having some
kind of a veto power.  It can be backed by such simple thing as just a
separate mailing list for feature requests or an Issue tracker.

As a Release manager I'd do the following:
- establish a regular release cycle (bi-monthly), transition to follow the
Rational version policy
- finish creating a comprehensive test-suite, and organize some automatic
testing process
- move development to github, where there is some rather
convenient infrastructure, like issue tracking (leaving a mirror on
common-lisp.net)
- work on improving documentation (also I'm currently doing a series of
articles about ASDF in Russian in my blog http://lisp-univ-etc.blogspot.com,
that I'm also going to translate to English eventually)
- continue work on separating ASDF itself and some support subsystems
- establish some basic contribution guidelines
- answer questions in the mailing list
- contribute to bug-fixing

My contribution to the Lisp library world is not that big.  It can be seen
at http://github.com/vseloved, so I'm not an expert Lisp developer (although
I claim to be one in my CV :)  Yet, I think I understand ASDF and
it's peculiarities enough, and also have a vision of its future to perform
that role.  So I'm willing to do that, if no better candidate will
volunteer.

Speaking about future vision, I think we should transition to a completely
declarative (read, but not eval'd) .asd-file format.  Also currently
(partially) broken things, like support for versioning and forcing should be
fixed.  Actually, that is mostly all, that is lacking.  (Surely, other needs
might actualize in the future...)  What will be left is just to
comprehensively and concisely describe all the patterns of possible ASDF
usage.

Best regards,
Vsevolod Dyomkin


On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 8:41 PM, Faré <fahree at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I hope that 2.008 will be my last ASDF release. I may still make
> emergency bug fixes (if any is needed), or merge patches sent to me,
> but I don't intend to actively develop ASDF anymore. I feel it has
> reached the point where I wanted it to be, although it took much more
> efforts than I feared. Just look at the git log to see how hard it
> was, and read my and Robert's paper for ILC'2010 to get an idea why we
> did things that way.
>   http://common-lisp.net/project/asdf/ilc2010draft.pdf
>
> And so, ASDF is looking for a new active maintainer. To volunteer,
> just start hacking on your own repo, and I'll hand you the keys after
> I merge your first commit.
>
> I intend to focus on XCVB, and its dependencies, cl-iolib and
> libfixposix. If ASDF moves towards more declarative .asd files, XCVB
> will certainly try to be compatible.
>
> [ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics |
> http://fare.tunes.org ]
> [...] there is what I call  the "roundtrip fallacy": it is a mistake to
> use,
> as journalists and some economists do, statistics without logic but the
> reverse
> does not hold:  It is not a mistake to use logic without statistics.
>        — N. C. Taleb, Fooled by Randomness, 2004.
>
> _______________________________________________
> asdf-devel mailing list
> asdf-devel at common-lisp.net
> http://common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/asdf-devel
>
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