[asdf-devel] MCL issue

[Faré]

>>: Pascal Costanza
>> Because ASDF 2.x caused me some trouble in RMCL, I actually put some effort
>> into learning logical pathnames - and they seem to work extremely well,
>> as far as I can tell
>>
Beware logical pathnames. They may "work extremely well" in some
implementations, and completely differently in some other — or be
absent or not well supported. In other words, they are not portable,
not enough the extremely constrained subset that is defined as
portable in the spec. That's the main reason why ASDF2, while it will
let you use them, isn't based on them.

If you want to start on a crusade to the spec to be extended to be
more useful and/or to get all Lisp implementations to actually use
such a spec — I'm sure many CL users will love you (especially
janderson!). Good luck.

>> (but it requires
>> specifying :ignore-inherited-configuration in
>> my source registry configuration, which seems somewhat unclean to me - but I
>> don't really know...)
>>
Why do you have to :ignore-inherited-configuration ???
Is there or was there something buggy in ASDF2?
Why didn't you report the bug and get it fixed?

>: Robert Goldman
> One undesirable feature is their refusal to permit filenames containing
> underscores or spaces:
>
> word---one or more uppercase letters, digits, and hyphens.
>
And SBCL, being the language lawyering prick we love it to be,
does enforce these limitations like all those it can from the standard.
Of course, Corman doesn't have portable pathnames, I wouldn't trust GCL,
and there might be bugs in ABCL, etc.

> I have also found that in practice merge-pathnames works inconsistently
> across lisp implementations.  Those inconsistencies seem acceptable
> within the scope of the ANSI spec.  This is actually something that is
> true of pathnames in general, and not just logical pathnames.  I believe
> that this is part of the reason that Faré moved to his own POSIX-y
> pathnames.
>
CL Pathnames are a pile of FAIL. Implementors try to save the day,
each in his own way, incompatible with what other implementors do.
ASDF papers somewhat over the fail with its own syntactic abstraction layer.

> Every time I have used logical pathnames, or even just used pathnames,
> they have blown up in my face, sooner or later, when code moved from one
> lisp implementation to another.  I, for one, welcome Fare replacing them
> inside ASDF2...
>
Thank you!

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Trillions of fossils can't be wrong!