[asdf-devel] What are current plans for RMCL?

[Faré]

>>> I'm asking for the following reasons: When ASDF was changed from 1.x to 2.x, this caused some problems for RMCL, which I eventually resolved by using Common Lisp's logical pathnames for the systems I maintain (primarily Closer to MOP and ContextL). However, the current maintainers of ASDF have an unjustified very low regard for logical pathnames, which causes a lot of pain - basically, whenever a new version of a Common Lisp implementation comes bundled with a new ASDF version, I have to deal with bugs in ASDF that in one way or the other break my setup with logical pathnames.
>>>
>> The problems were fixed as soon as a suitable bug report was provided
>> (i.e. not by you).
>
> I have submitted bug reports, and provided descriptions of my setup (I think, actually, more than once). Have you entered them in the test suite for ASDF? (Do you have a test suite for ASDF?) I find it hard to believe they don't show up on your side if you continue testing that setup. (The bugs occur in SBCL, Clozure and LispWorks, for example…)
>
No, you have
(1) submitted "it hasn't been working for months" reports,
  rather than submit a bug report a few months earlier;
(2) repeatedly failed to give detailed bug reports,
  so we can only guess what the failure is;
(3) systematically failed to respond when I committed fixes
  (based on someone else's report)
  and subsequently inquired whether the fix worked for you.
(4) been more and more abusive in your emails.

I have just spend quite a few hours adding test cases for logical-pathnames
(my, are they confusing - see for instance this bug I filed:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/sbcl/+bug/980023
Definitely not something I'll recommend for anyone to try).

I added a test file to our test-suite
with various use cases forways to use logical-pathnames
(yes, I know, I could have done so earlier; so could you.
Why do I, who despises logical-pathnames and think they are a bad idea,
have to support them, spend hours on the task, and get insulted for it?)
I found that checkin 2.017.6 b7aa30f74a4f94908ca17fc82193f4f7b47912a6,
designed to make the effect of loading asd files more consistent
by binding *default-pathname-defaults* to the file's directory,
interacted badly with logical-pathnames on most implementations.
http://trac.clozure.com/ccl/ticket/953
After a fix of translate-logical-pathname'ing before to bind,
it all works on CCL, but unhappily not on several other Lisps I've tried.
There are therefore more bugs in ASDF's support for logical pathnames.

I note that no user of logical-pathnames has reported any error for months.
I apologize for being bad at supporting them,
with bugs get fixing only in a matter of days.
Of course, if you upgrade your support contract to Platinum,
we'll give you fixes in hours.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
The best place to find a helping hand is at the end of your own arm.