[asdf-devel] Some points raised

[Robert Goldman]

On 9/24/10 Sep 24 -3:49 AM, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll wrote:
> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/93a4b06a66b0b335
> 
> 1- The new configuration and file searching mechanism is causing some grief.

Unfortunately, the author's complaints are insufficiently clear for me
to provide any assistance.  Plus I'm not an authority on the
configuration languages.

If anyone would like to supply bits of configuration hinting ---
snippets that handle common tasks --- I am willing to undertake to get
them integrated into the manual.

Looking over the manual itself, I think it would help if it provided a
clearer statement of what you get if you simply leave
ASDF-OUTPUT-TRANSLATIONS unconfigured and let the defaults rule.  It's
possible that this is buried in there, but I had a little trouble
winkling it out.  Possibly a FAQ entry.

One common task, it seems to me, would be to say "I would like to supply
a library that is a source tree that contains multiple system
definitions.  How do I provide with this library a configuration snippet
that will allow a user to find all the system definitions in this
subtree?  How do I direct users to modify their ASDF configuration to
point to their installed copy of my source tree and incorporate the
configuration snippet that I have supplied?"

Extra credit (this comes up for me):  How do I supply a configuration
snippet for a source tree that contains many .asd files, but also
contains a big mess of Java code?  Said Java code will create a very
dense thicket of subdirectories, which can cause ASDF to go out to lunch
searching for asd files.  Can I provide in my configuration something
like find's '-prune' directive to avoid traversing these subtrees?

If anyone has great instructions for this, I will be delighted to
incorporate them.

> 
> 2- Lack *-user mailing list and need of subscription for questions. Is
> there a sufficiently large comunity here and do we want to open the list?

With all due respect, opening a list is pretty much never a good idea.
It's just asking for spam.  Per my response to the above complainer, I
think it would be great if there was a help web site that

1.  Allowed OpenID login --- no need for new accounts

2.  Served up questions to the interested through email digest and RSS.
 As a potential question-answerer, I don't have time to log in to such a
web site.  I would need to have the questions pushed at me.

Is there any such existing software that we could adopt?