[asdf-devel] cl-growl and weakly-depends-on

[Faré]

Dear Pat,

I'd like to kill the evil that is :weakly-depends-on, and your
cl-growl seems to be the only user of it in quicklisp.

:weakly-depends-on is evil because it's non-deterministic, and what
code you get depends on which order things were compiled or
configured, and you can't fix things after the fact. Could you stop
using it?

Alternatives include having a separate system foo+bar that explicitly
loads foo and bar before doing the connection, and/or using
asdf-system-connections to automatically load foo+bar when both foo
and bar have been loaded. I don't personally like this automatic
loading, but at least it doesn't break determinism.

As for allowing a system to run with or without another, that's what
hooks are call, i.e. runtime configuration variables.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
So that there be reality, there must be an observer.
"I am, therefore someone thinks."       — Faré