[asdf-devel] source file encoding

[Douglas Crosher]

The portable-hemlock is still maintained and was updated a few months ago to avoid the use of non-ascii characters in the source so
it builds cleanly with UTF-8 as the input external-format.  The code is not in great shape, but is being improved.  See:
http://gitorious.org/hemlock/pages/Home

Even if you get all the quick lisp projects converted to be UTF-8 clean, this still represents a subset of ASDF users.  I wish you
would reconsider these changes to ASDF because I fear it is divisive.   It is not reasonable to expect users of ASDF to hack on
external support code just to use non-UTF-8 external-formats, and the external library you plan for can never be complete because
the external-format is user extensible.  ASDF could easily be flexible regarding the external-format and not a limited bastion of
portable open source code.  It would be very easy and workable to just name this :external-format, and to pass through encodings not
recognised - all the quicklisp projects would work just fine using :utf-8 and other CL users could use encodings as needed.

Regards
Douglas Crosher

On 04/08/2012 03:04 PM, Faré wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 13:44, Faré <fahree at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I did a ckeck of quicklisp systems.  There are 263 lisp files in 107
>>> systems which assume non-ASCII, and only 31 of them in 20 systems assume
>>> non-UTF-8:
>>>
>> OK. Any volunteer to contact the authors of these 20 systems and get
>> each issue fixed?
>> Or even to split the job in 2, 3, 4, 5?
>>
> OK, I contacted all the authors or maintainers of the offending software
> that Orivej identified as requiring a fix to compile.
> 
> In at least one case (regex), the original author's address
> Michael Parker <mparker762 at hotmail.com> is invalid,
> and I contacted a maintainer instead Michael Weber <michaelw at foldr.org>
> who might not be the source that Xach uses judging from the version number
> in Quicklisp (michaelw uses darcs, but quicklisp
> has a version 1 instead of $date-darcs).
> I'm not convinced that portable-hemlock is actively maintained either.
> 
> I updated the status page at
> https://github.com/orivej/asdf-encodings/wiki/Tracking-non-UTF-8-lisp-files-in-Quicklisp
> 
> Finally, I created a mostly useless asdf-encodings at:
>   ssh://common-lisp.net/project/asdf/git/asdf-encodings.git
>   git://common-lisp.net/projects/asdf/asdf-encodings.git
> I invite those people who want to use non-UTF-8 encodings
> to submit patches to this project.
> 
> —♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
> A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.
> 	— Joseph Campbell
> 
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