The dictatorship of versioning

[Robert Goldman]

On 6/16/15 Jun 16 -10:33 AM, Didier Verna wrote:
> Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.net> wrote:
> 
>> Just to clarify: I am NOT saying Pascal is wrong to want these things
>> or to do them himself.  And I AM saying that ASDF should make it
>> possible for him to do so.
> 
>   ASDF could call FORMATTED-VERSION itself to initialize the
>   corresponding slot (if any), and refrain from providing a writer for it.
> 

I suppose, but then calling FORMATTED-VERSION would just amount to
memoizing the value of FORMATTED-VERSION into a slot on the ASDF system
object.  Why would that be a win over just calling FORMATTED-VERSION on
demand?

I.e., we could just provide something like

(defgeneric FORMATTED-VERSION (C &optional version)
  (:method ((COMPONENT C) &optional version)
     (or version (component-version c)))

and then the programmer could extend this as needed.

cheers,
r