SBCL support [Was: Re: Towards release 3.1.6]

Robert Goldman rpgoldman at sift.net
Thu Oct 15 15:33:03 UTC 2015


On 10/15/15 Oct 15 -12:40 AM, Faré wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 6:55 PM, Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.net> wrote:
>>>>> Apparently, the first release that include PRINT-BACKTRACE is 1.1.5
>>>>> from February 2013.
>>>>>
> 
>>> Considering that the propagation latency for ASDF itself is about 2
>>> years, it might be a bad idea
>>> to drop support for things that are only a bit over a year old (sbcl
>>> 1.1.18, last in the series).
>>> That said, it's true that SBCL upgrades ASDF about every year, so that
>>> makes more sense. Still.
>>> I would say that 2 year old is probably a better rule of thumb.
>>
>> The problem with this rule of thumb is that it requires the ASDF
>> maintainer (me) to track SBCL releases and be able to map release
>> numbers to dates.  I don't like that.  It's more work and cognitive load
>> that I really don't have room for.
>>
>> Given that some version of 1.1.x of SBCL can no longer be supported, I'd
>> prefer to write off all of 1.1
>>
> Well in cases like this where we introduce backward incompatibility,
> we still have to use git to identify the change back to which we
> remain compatible,
> to make sure it's old enough — and at that point, git gives us both the date and
> number of the first release that includes the change for free.

I'm sorry, that's too much cognitive load.  2 significant digits is all
I'm willing to track, and I'm not willing to track dates.

So I'm not going to reject patches that will support SBCL 1.1.x
versions, but as far as I'm concerned, ASDF only supports 1.2.x

Best,
r





More information about the asdf-devel mailing list