[asdf-devel] About some new system slots

[Faré]

On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info> wrote:
> 1.  I believe that the value of a *human-readable* piece of meta-data here should be obvious.  Particularly if you get a version of a library from some source (tarball, quicklisp), that has a bug you wish to fix.  It would be nice if you didn't have to track down the VCS for yourself (particularly if there are multiple possible candidates in DVCS world).  But for this all we need is an arbitrary string such as "git repository git://common-lisp.net/projects/asdf/asdf.git".  This requires no action on the part of the ASDF developers.  Note that Faré's format meets this criterion, as well.
>
Yes, and because darcs, svn, git, and possibly more, can all be done
over http, it isn't sufficient to have a URL, and/or that would
require some magic autodetection. Explicit specification of the VCS
seems better to me.

> 2.  It is an open question whether *machine-readable* meta-data would be useful.  My previous response was directed at machine-readable meta-data.  This could be either (a) something that prescribes enough of a format to ensure happily formatted information (e.g., for CL-TEST-GRID), or (b) something that would support automated access to the version control repository encoded in the system description.  As I said, it's not clear that this is needed right now.  My proposal would aim at this, but is probably premature.
>
At the very least, machine readable means you can automate the
push-button task of downloading the upstream source of a system and/or
all its relevant dependencies when given a tarball, or a lisp image
where the system is loaded. Admittedly, if the system is already in
quicklisp, quicklisp can possibly give you the answer already, so this
might be redundant. On the other hands, systems need not be in
quicklisp.

In any case, this was one feature requested by users, that I find
passably useful, and that had been done badly in non-standard ways in
the past in various systems, so I at least introduced the slot and a
proposed format for it, but pending an actual documented proposal,
nothing is enforced about the value in this slot as of yet.

Of course, I'm not the one to decide anymore. I'm just here to assist
the new maintainer in understanding previous decisions. Good luck,
Robert!

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Everything is interesting if you go into it *deeply* enough.
	— Richard Feynman