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

[Eric Timmons]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 3:34 PM, Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.net> wrote:
>
> Sorry, I'm not trying to be difficult, but that solution is unacceptable
> to me.  From my POV as maintainer, it seems like the worst of all
> worlds.  We would be introducing yet more moving parts -- a new package,
> ASDF-EXTENSIONS, that we would have to keep track of -- without  solving
> the problem of name collisions.  This seems strictly worse than the
> status quo.
>
> If someone wants to *fix* the double-parsing solution, that's fine.  But
> I'm not going to keep around the broken double-parsing solution.

Would there be anything wrong with saying everyone should use strings to name
symbols from ASDF extensions? Component types and :class already seem to support
this. A quick glance through the code makes me think :in-order-to and inline
methods would be fairly easy to modify to support it as well. I'd be happy to
send in a patch for it.

It seems this would solve the issue with namespace clashes and get rid of the
need for load-systems before the defsystem. There's still a lot of work if
someone wants a completely declarative version of defsystem, but at least it's
a step in that direction.

-Eric