[asdf-devel] News on the front

[Faré]

Dear Lisp hackers,

I've completed yet another major pass of refactoring of ASDF.
It is now divided into many files, that are concatenated together for
single-file delivery.
(An idea that I once rejected when James Anderson proposed it 3 years ago;
he might have known better. The file has more than quadrupled in size since.)
>From a pristine git checkout, you can concatenate them from the
command-line with
   make build/asdf.lisp
or from lisp with a recent bootstrapped asdf.lisp with
   (asdf:operate 'asdf::concatenate-source-op :generate-asdf)

About 45% of ASDF is utilities, and those are now available through
a semi-independent system asdf-driver. See make wc wc-driver wc-asdf.
I'have notably moved in run-program/ from xcvb-driver,
and its native-namestring support, by popular demand,
which increased this number.
I brought in the condition-control code and image support from
xcvb-driver as well;
I'll be working to package them better.
Hot upgrade is preserved through the heroic development of define-package,
an extension to defpackage that makes things as declared from however they were,
instead of throwing an error at the first discrepancy. You better know
what you want.

As a result from this and all the package declarations,
plus the bundle and concatenate support,
ASDF has swollen 60% in size since 2.26,
or 42% since I merged in asdf-bundle in 2.26.7.
I'll argue that the functionality is also much improved,
including the fixing of the fundamental build model
that I've discussed in previous emails.

I won't release anything until all the packages in quicklisp work,
and I'll have to install cl-test-grid for that, but I invite those of you
who are interested to test it and/or comment on the changes.

It looks like I mostly understand ASDF these days.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Every technique is first developed, then used, important, obsolete,
normalized, and finally understood.