[asdf-devel] ASDF 3.0.1

Faré fahree at gmail.com
Thu May 16 23:49:15 UTC 2013


Dear Lisp hackers,

ASDF 3.0.0 was decidedly short-lived. Longer live ASDF 3.0.1!

An undocumented feature of version-satisfies, since the early days of ASDF 1,
was that it would reject a component that didn't exactly match the specified
major version as well as otherwise be same or newer as specified version.
Of course, this broke quicklisp's check for a newer ASDF when ASDF went
from major version 2 to major version 3.
Since the feature was undocumented, and that users don't seem to ask for it,
whereas many power users are inconvenienced by it, I just removed it.

A future maintainer of ASDF may extend the
`(:version ,dependency ,minimum-version)
pattern for specifying dependencies with a
`(:version ,dependency ,minimum-version ,too-large-version)
pattern that allows to specify an exclusive upper bound on compatible versions.
This would allow finer specification of compatible version ranges than just
a match on the major version. But I didn't implement it.
I leave it as an exercise for whoever volunteers to replace me,
since I'm definitely leaving active maintenance of ASDF
and unwilling to implement new features,
though I will still fix bugs until a new maintainer rises.

PS: this fiasco also suggests that a new maintainer shall include some
typical quicklisp usage as part of the automated test suite.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
When you are young you are afraid people will steal your ideas;
when you are old you are afraid they won't. — David D. Friedman



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