[asdf-devel] Please test 2.20.16

[Douglas Crosher]

The :encoding support is a dead end and I suggest it be removed now and not be put forward to the wider community.  The
documentation encouraging the use of the :encoding option is not constructive.  People would be poorly advised to use the :encoding
option in preference to an encoding file option.

The latest documentation additions:

"We invite you to embrace UTF-8 as the encoding for non-ASCII characters starting today, even without any explicit specification in
your .asd files.  Indeed, on some implementations and configurations, UTF-8 is already the :default, and loading your code may cause
errors if it is encoded in anything but UTF-8.  Therefore, even with the legacy behaviour,  non-UTF-8 is guaranteed to break for
some users, whereas UTF-8 is pretty much guaranteed not to break anywhere, although it might be read incorrectly on some
implementations.  In the future, we intend to make @code{:utf-8} the default, to be enforced everywhere, so at least the code is
guaranteed to be read correctly everywhere it can be."

People would be poorly advised to use any encoding without regard for the locale.  Even UTF-8 is not guaranteed to 'not break
anywhere' - just try running SBCL in an ISO-8859-1 locale and loading UTF-8!  There is no need to make :utf-8 the default or to
enforce it and this is not an appropriate path.

Regards
Douglas Crosher

On 04/17/2012 02:29 AM, Faré wrote:
> OK, so I propose we freeze the current state of ASDF for a release 2.21,
> hopefully some time next week.
> Please test 2.20.16.
> 
> Changes since 2.20:
> * New features:
>  * Most importantly, encodings.
>   ASDF now lets you specify an :encoding for a system, module or component,
>   that is used when loading or compiling Lisp files.
>   See the documentation.
>   By default, the only useful value is :utf-8, and
>   we recommend you use UTF-8 everywhere.
>   We intend to make it the default in the future
>   (current default is the legacy behavior of using whichever implicit
>   default your underlying implementation is currently configured to use).
>   An extension asdf-encodings is available that supports more encodings,
>   including autodetection of encoding in the near future.
>  * You can now specify :hostname in your asdf-output-translations,
>   so you can easily share a home directory yet split its fasl cache
>   between several subtly different machines.
> * Bug Fixes:
>  * lp#982285. since 2.014.4, the default source-registry
>   was skipping anything from /usr or XDG_DATA_DIRS,
>   because of a missing test in getenv-absolute-pathnames. Fixed in .15.
>  * In 2.019.9 aka 2.20, ECL support was broken by using
>   a function in the wrong package (defined in cl-user). Fixed in .1.
>  * logical-pathname support was somewhat broken since 2.017.6,
>   due to the way most implementations fail to read physical namestrings
>   when *default-pathname-defaults* is a logical-pathname.
>   Fixed, together with other logical-pathname issues,
>   and a test case was added to the test suite to ensure no further regression.
>   Works great modulo quirks around implementation bugs on CLISP and Allegro.
> * Minor tweaks:
>  * Use :unspecific in pathname components on more implementations.
>  * export and/or document more utilities.
>  * add a few missing compatfmt for Genera.
> 
> I do not intend to make any further changes to ASDF before the 2.21 release,
> except for fixes to any bug found, of course.
> Experiments with encodings and autodetection are redirected to
> the asdf-encodings system for the time being.
> Discussion of a possible merge of asdf-encodings into ASDF
> will happen only after asdf-encodings itself is reasonably stable.
> 
> —♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
> The mice which helplessly find themselves between the cats teeth acquire no
> merit from their enforced sacrifice.		— Mahatma Gandhi
> 
> _______________________________________________
> asdf-devel mailing list
> asdf-devel at common-lisp.net
> http://lists.common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/asdf-devel
>