[asdf-devel] BUILD-OP

[Faré]

>> 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.
>
> MAKE is less cumbersome than my proposed DO-DEFAULT-OPERATION.
>
> On the other hand, I have already code with a MAKE-OP (and a MAKE-SYSTEM
> class) defined, because I have an ASDF extension that allows ASDF to
> invoke a Makefile through make as part of a compilation.
>
Is your make-op in the package ASDF? If not, there is no conflict.

> MAKE-OP seems like not an unusual thing for people to want to do in
> their systems.....
>
> In this connection, it might be time to talk about the package protocol
> for ASDF extensions.  Forcing all such extensions into the ASDF package
> is not really a scalable approach for a set of code that's not centrally
> managed.  But can people effectively use package-qualified names for
> classes and operations in ASDF system definitions?  It may be that the
> answer to that is "naturally yes," but I'd have to investigate further.
>  I'm pretty sure that the current way we process DEFSYSTEM-DEPENDS-ON
> would not handle such names well (the package for the package-qualified
> name would not yet exist, causing a reader error), forcing people to
> back off to using procedural (ASDF:LOAD-SYSTEM "my-asdf-extension") in
> their .asd files...
>
That's a great question, and I had only thought about it yesterday.
Look at the build-op branch: I did improve the protocol so that
strings may be used as designators for either operation classes or
component classes, that will be read as a symbol while in package
ASDF, but a : or :: prefix can override the package. This makes the
component class parsing in parse-defsystem oh so slightly backward
incompatible, so we'll have to cl-test-grid the change, but I suspect
no one uses the undocumented corner cases that are backward
incompatible. Now you can:

(defsystem foo
  :defsystem-depends-on (foo-ext)
  :class "foo-ext:system"
  :components (("foo-ext:file" "file1")
                       (:some-class-in-package-asdf "file2")))

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my mindset at an early age that failure is not the outcome, failure is not
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