[asdf-devel] The issue at hand

[Robert P. Goldman]

James Anderson has asked for a "concise statement of the issue at hand."

Faré has had to change the semantics of the OPERATION class.
Previously, the OPERATION class would automatically trigger dependencies
downward (notably, if you did an OPERATION on a system, then you had to
do that OPERATION as well on that OPERATION's children), "leftward," and
onto itself ("selfward").

The implementation of this left holes, and also caused problems for
extensions (e.g., for TEST-OP, one typically had to define a default
PERFORM that did nothing, since testing a system necessarily tested all
of the files).

To fix this, Faré had to add new mixin classes, DOWNWARD-OPERATION,
UPWARD-OPERATION, SIDEWAY-OPERATION, and SELFWARD-OPERATION.

In order to preserve the integrity of the code, OPERATION remained as
the superclass of all operation objects.  But its semantics has changed.

This is not a problem for anyone with a "vanilla" ASDF system.  The only
programmers who are vulnerable to this change are those who have defined
their own subclasses of OPERATION (or those who use libraries whose
programmers have defined subclasses of OPERATION).

For those cases, I have pushed a change that checks to make sure that
all operations that are instantiated are subclasses of either
DOWNWARD-OPERATION, UPWARD-OPERATION, SIDEWAY-OPERATION,
SELFWARD-OPERATION, or a new NON-PROPAGATING-OPERATION. If this run-time
test fails, an error will be signaled and the programmer will have to
fix the offending OPERATION subclass's definition.