[asdf-devel] ASDF-USER ?

Robert Goldman rpgoldman at sift.info
Sun Jan 27 17:13:46 UTC 2013


On 1/26/13 Jan 26 -6:12 PM, Faré wrote:
> I think the whole "temporary package" thing is a failure, and we
> should just have
> an ASDF-USER package that uses ASDF.
> 
> Does anyone have any objection to having .asd files be loaded in
> a shared ASDF-USER rather than a temporary ASDF~D package?
> 
> If you want to define your own private functions in their private namespace,
> there's defpackage for you.

I am sympathetic to your concerns here, but I am worried that it will
cause lots of breakage.

I have always done the old-school thing and defined a new package for my
system definition.  This makes for a pleasing symmetry between behavior
where I incrementally evaluate forms, and when I load the system into an
image.

*HOWEVER*, some CL pundits seem to think that making extra packages is
bad, and in a spirit of (to me, misguided) parsimony, strongly
encouraged people to rely on the creation of the temporary packages.

I fear that this means that loading all the package definitions into a
single ASDF-USER package is likely to cause breakage from namespace
collisions.

Also, I fear that this will be a nuisance to catch in testing, because
it is likely to require testing large numbers of *combinations* of
loaded systems to simulate behavior downstream programmers might see.

In my customary role as backward compatibility buzz-kill, I suggest that
we keep the old behavior.

Best,
r






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