[asdf-devel] source file encoding

[Robert Goldman]

Sorry --- I am catching up on this discussion after a long time doing
other things.  Looking things over, I was left with some questions (I
hope these haven't been thoroughly discussed and I missed the answers):

Is there some reason why we must put the external-format into the
property list instead of just giving it a slot in the component class
definition?

Also, what sort of an entity are the external format values?  Is it
always a keyword symbol?  Can we say that it should always be a keyword
and that we will massage it to something else, if necessary, for the
benefit of the implementation when reading a file?

In that case we could have an accessor that will do the
implementation-specific massaging for us (e.g., we could store :utf-8,
but on clisp we would present charset:utf-8 when reading...).  That
seems somehow tidier to me, rather than changing the value behind the
programmer's back as we do here.  OTOH, we do quietly change symbols to
strings, so maybe I'm just talking through my hat.

I wasn't sure I understood the following paragraph, either:

   "I'd also like to express concern that this change has to be properly
announced because it will affect those who use ASDF for their local
projects with non UTF-8 compliant encoding and previously assumed that
other ASDF systems fit into ASCII."

Can you amplify?

Thanks for any enlightenment!