[asdf-devel] How should ASDF return cached system definition information

[Robert P. Goldman]

The latest version of ASDF contains three functions:

SYSTEM-DEFSYSTEM-DEPENDS-ON
SYSTEM-DEPENDS-ON and
SYSTEM-WEAKLY-DEPENDS-ON

that return information about defined systems.  The intention is to
support introspection about sets of systems (I believe Quicklisp does
this today).

Currently, ASDF does *not* put the return values into canonical form.
So, equivalent forms like

:depends-on (foo)
and
:depends-on ("foo")

will yield different return values.

Similarly, :version specifications will not be resolved.

This seems wrong to me.  I feel that the return values should be
canonicalized.  So all system names should be resolved down to
lower-cased strings.

Does that sound like the right approach?  It would support performing
inference on the systems relatively straightforwardly. I can't imagine
why people would want the exact, literal slot initforms, but I could be
wrong.

R