[asdf-devel] BUILD-OP

[Robert P. Goldman]

Faré wrote:
>>> >> 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.

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.

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...