[asdf-devel] MCL issue

[Pascal Costanza]

On 19 May 2011, at 21:57, Faré wrote:

>>> : 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 —

Not according to my experience.

> or be absent or not well supported.

That would be a non-conforming CL implementation.

> 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.

I don't understand what I did to deserve such snippy remarks. ASDF 2 has problems with a particular conforming Common Lisp implementation because it depends on a feature that is implementation-dependent by definition. All I did is that I asked for workarounds and reported whatever I could to enable you to fix the problem.

>>> (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?

I did report this particular issue on 23 January 2011 in this mailing list.

>> : 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.

Yes, some CL implementations extend certain CL features with additional capabilities. This is allowed by the CL specification, and relying on such extensions makes your programs non-portable by definition. So if you want your program / library to be portable, you shouldn't rely on them. I don't see what's so hard to understand about these concepts.

>> 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!

I think it's ok to have alternatives to the existing standard features. I don't think that ASDF should push such an alternative to the extent that the existing standard feature cannot be used anymore (or only with workarounds).

I'm not sure what your intention is, but the way you react to my problem reports gives me the impression that you _may_ not be interested in giving CL logical pathnames the same status as your own Unix-specific solution. Maybe my impression is wrong, but then I don't understand your reaction at all.


Pascal

--
Pascal Costanza
The views expressed in this email are my own, and not those of my employer.