[asdf-devel] New ASDF maintainer sought

[Robert Goldman]

On 9/12/10 Sep 12 -11:48 AM, Vsevolod Dyomkin wrote:
> Hi,

Some random comments....

> 
> 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.
> 
....
> 
> As a Release manager I'd do the following:
> - establish a regular release cycle (bi-monthly), transition to follow
> the Rational version policy

Three points with respect to this:

1.  We should probably have a definition of "rational version policy,"
at least by citation.

2. If the rational version policy is the numbering scheme I found by
googling, I don't believe it is  compatible with asdf:version-satisfies.
 I would suggest we avoid adopting a policy that doesn't meet that
constraint.

3. Is this bi-monthly release policy wrt ASDF 3?  In my fondest dreams
ASDF2 is getting stable and the ASDF 2 release cycle should be "very
rarely, never in the limit."  I say this not just because I am looking
forward to ASDF 2 being done, but also because ASDF is critically
foundational to the entire open source CL community.  In order for
members of this community to be able to share work, ASDF's API needs to
be very, very stable (see the paper Faré and I wrote about ASDF 2
development for a more thorough presentation of the need for stability).

> - finish creating a comprehensive test-suite, and organize some
> automatic testing process 

This would be very good.  BTW, I have just discovered that there are at
least three different ways to start CCL, and only one of them is
currently exercised by our test suite.

> - move development to github, where there is some rather
> convenient infrastructure, like issue tracking (leaving a mirror on
> common-lisp.net <http://common-lisp.net>)

Is there some reason that common-lisp.net + launchpad is unsatisfactory?

> - 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

This sounds great.

Best,
Robert