[asdf-devel] Regression on Allegro Common Lisp

[Robert P. Goldman]

Faré wrote:
> I committed more or less the change Dave suggested.
> 
> You are in a maze of subtly incompatible implementation buglets, all
> different.
> 
> All that because the standard tried to compromise between incompatible
> implementations, instead of (1) mandating some standardized 1-1 access
> to the underlying OS, and (2) standardizing on constructions on top of
> that or parametric abstractions from that. So instead of having
> well-defined tools (that may not be a complete solution indeed), we have
> horribly undefined tools (that still may not be a complete solution, and
> now actually cannot be).
> 
> And so, instead of having two standard APIs, one for Windows and one for
> Unix, on top of which to build robust things, we have thirty-odd
> different APIs, all of them incompatible,
> none of them reasonably standard.

That's an old problem of having a standard that is never-changing.  When
the standard was made Windows was hardly a thing -- certainly not for
serious computing -- and they were concerned with portability to things
like Lisp machines that hardly even had an OS....

No, the problem is that the standard has never evolved beyond the
ANSI.... :-(  Seems like each of the implementations has some good
ideas, but none has all of the good ones.

I'll pull again and re-test.

It should make you feel better that your hard work on the regression
tests has let us spot these bugs almost instantly.

Best,
r