[asdf-devel] deprecating run-shell-command

[Robert Goldman]

I know why we have done this, but I deeply regret it.

ASDF claims to be able to do things like build C code to be linked into
lisp systems.

It cannot do this without something like ASDF:RUN-SHELL-COMMAND.

I understand that XCVB-DRIVER:RUN-PROGRAM is proposed as an alternative,
but this adds a dependency chain to ASDF in a way that I feel to be
unfortunate.

Even though it will make ASDF bigger, I would like to see
ASDF:RUN-SHELL-COMMAND (or RUN-PROGRAM) get undeprecated, possibly by
having ASDF eat its own copy of XCVB-DRIVER:RUN-PROGRAM.

I understand the history of CL enough to know why RUN-PROGRAM was not in
the original ANSI spec, but now that CL has moved to general-purpose
computers, I think it's something that we need to provide integrally.
And putting it into ASDF is as close as we can come to doing that.

[As an aside, I can see the tidiness advantage of shattering the full
set of functions into a large set of smaller libraries.  However, this
makes configuring a reasonably sized CL software development project
into a chore of herding a very large set of small libraries.  This is
not something that our community has the person-hour resources for --
many of our libraries fall into an un-maintained state.
Philosophically, I have a bit of a beef with this position, too --- this
is, after all Common Lisp, and not Scheme.]

Cheers,
r