A modest proposition: DEFSYSTEM-DEPENDS-ON should die [was Re: What's the right way to extend ASDF with new symbols?]

[Faré]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 3:19 PM, Stelian Ionescu <sionescu at cddr.org> wrote:
> No, have it search for a symbol named (string :foo/file) first in
> ASDF/EXTENSIONS then ASDF, for backwards-compatibility, then one day
> only ASDF/EXTENSIONS.
>
1- Why not just the use existing ASDF/USER rather than a newfangled
ASDF/EXTENSIONS ?

2- I understand both points of view, and don't have an opinion —
except that whichever way the ASDF maintainer moves, it will take a
lot of efforts and a lot of time before you can pull the plug on the
current code.

For reference, Clojure also has the convention of prefixing keywords
with a "namespace" name (their namespaces are more or less the moral
equivalent of CL packages), as in :foo/bar for a keyword bar that
declares being owned by foo.

I can also see the point of using the existing CL package conventions.
I removed in ASDF3 the old ASDF 1.x trick of having temporary packages
ASDF0, ASDF1, etc., for each .asd file being read, instead of a common
ASDF-USER and letting people manage their own packages manually. That
old didn't actually help with symbol hygiene, and only got in the way,
while people still needed to defpackage their own packages for
extensions and anything worth clashing.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM'.
        — Alan Cox