[asdf-devel] BUILD-OP

[Faré]

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.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea,
which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to
himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the
possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because
every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me,
receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his
taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should
freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual
instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been
peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like
fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any
point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical
being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then
cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
    —Thomas Jefferson