[asdf-devel] distributing asdf

[Faré]

> The only positive practical difference I've seen between ASDF 1 and ASDF
> 2 is the automatic FASL segregation.
>
Which to work everywhere correctly by default requires non-trivial
runtime support, configuration file support, pathname support,
implementation-specific compilation support.

Oh yeah, did you notice that specifying either unix namestrings
or relative pathnames in your system definitions just works, portably,
on all implementations and all operating systems?

And did you notice that inter-module dependencies were propagated?
(thanks to rpgoldman for the initial fix)

Did you notice that ASDF can be require'd out of the box
on nine different implementations, and works on 14 plus variants,
on four vastly different operating systems (though only two may really matter)?

Actually, the less you noticed about these issues, the better.

But it sometimes requires massive amount of work for users not to notice
breakage that was inevitable in previous versions.

Hopefully, with ASDF 2.27 you won't notice the lack of weird failures
as dependencies do not fail to be propagated anymore in the many cases
that previous versions of ASDF could not conceivably cover
due to deep conceptual bugs.

> Also, Quicklisp is just a subset of the CL code out there; not breaking
> stuff in Quicklisp is good, but not breaking anything at all is good
Of course, but not always possible, when massive refactoring is due.
If I break a never-exported feature that isn't used in quicklisp, and
that I was never contacted about using,
I feel that the failed user bears some responsibility.

> Please keep an audience like me in mind when documenting feature
> updates.
>
I just send a quick summary of user-visible changes so far.
I'll answer any questions about it.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Reason wins in the long run, because irrational memes fight each other,
whereas rational memes add up.