[asdf-devel] has ":depends-on ((:version ...))" semantics changed?

Robert P. Goldman rpgoldman at sift.info
Mon Nov 18 03:50:32 UTC 2013


Wait, what?

Are you saying now that version 1.0.0 of Closer-MOP will satisfy the
requirement of 0.55, and that Anton should *not* be having this build
failure.

Because I don't think it *is* a bug.

If someone releases version 2.0 of a software package, and I have a
library that relies on version 1.x, I *want* to be warned that the API
has moved under me.

For that matter, if a library has been unmaintained for three years (I'm
talking about you, moptilities!) while its dependencies have moved under
it, I would like to be warned that it's likely not to be working.

I'm willing to see some special-purpose kludge to break this for the
ASDF upgrade case, because we have set things up so that ASDF upgrades
should work whenever one version is greater than another.

Even for ASDF, code that relied on old versions of the ASDF API should
not be fooled into thinking that it will be forward compatible.  That's
why I insisted on bumping to ASDF 3 to reflect the fact that the API had
changed.

MOPTILITIES *should* break under the current circumstances; that's not a
bad thing.  Either someone should look and see if it's compatible with a
new version of Closer-MOP and take the 2.4 seconds required to bump the
:VERSION dependency, or if it's not worth anyone's time to do that,
maybe it's not a library that people should be using, and it should get
garbage-collected from the community.

Best,
r



More information about the asdf-devel mailing list