[asdf-devel] defsystem behaviour

[Daniel Barlow]

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


-dan