[asdf-devel] BUILD-OP

[Faré]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 11:47 PM, Faré <fahree at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Robert,
>
> I pushed my changes to your build-op branch. Easier than mailing patches.
>
>>> Well, ASDF itself has long been described as a build system or build tool
>>> (including in our ILC 2010 article), just like make, ant, etc.
>>> See also Wikipedia pages for each of these.
>>> What do these programs do? They build.
>>> I don't love the word, but I don't know a better one.
>>
>> I get it, but now ASDF does more than one kind of build, including some
>> things (with the bundle-op) that look a lot more like what 'make' does
>> than what ASDF has done up to now.
>>
> Indeed. On the other hand, you just acknowledged that all these things
> are a kind of "build".
>
>> Up to now, there's been no real need to distinguish between "build" and
>> "load", but now there are things that look like a conventional C program
>> build, rather than like what DEFSYSTEM did before.
>>
> Hence my recommending making load-system not the main interface anymore,
> but build. Loading is just the common case for CL systems.
>
>> Let's not rush into this: as Attila has pointed out, whatever we choose,
>> we'll have to live with for a long while.
>>
> There's no rush, but I'd really like it as part of ASDF 3.1.1,
> and I'm really hoping for a release this month.
>
>> Unfortunately, I think both DO and LOAD are non-starters because of the
>> pain they would impose on anyone who wants to USE-PACKAGE ASDF.
>>
> Of course, I only suggested the former as a joke.
> Although UIOP provides the :MIX option to DEFINE-PACKAGE
> that nicely deals with all these conflicts.
>
>> What about something bland like "start"?  Or we could get all Star Trek
>> and use "make it so" ;-)
>>
> I think this is even more misleading than "build".
> It feels like you are starting a program.
> "make" could do it.
>
Note that if we rename it make, it would also be nice to rename
build-op to make-op before anyone uses it.
We should also rename :build-operation to :make-operation or :make-op
or :make, and just have some #-asdf3.1 in asdf.asd to cope with
upgrade from the one and only current client of it, i.e. current
versions of asdf3.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Mathematicians are like lovers. Grant a mathematician the least principle, and
he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this
consequence another. — Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle