Question about DEFSYSTEM-DEPENDS-ON

[Faré]

>>>>:Faré

>>>> (defsystem "foo-test"
>>>>   :defsystem-depends-on ("fiveam") :depends-on ("foo")
>>>>   :class "fiveam-asdf:fiveam-tester-system"
>>>>   :components (("some-system:its-component-class" "myfile" ...) ...) ...)
>>>>
>>>> This has been working since 2.31.4.

>>:Robert

>> I'm boggled.  I have been complaining about this issue in the past, and
>> I attach an email from February of this year, in which Faré clearly
>> implies that there is no solution to the D-D-O/package bad package
>> interaction issues.  See his point #3.
>>
>> And now.... it's been fixed for years?  It seems like if so, even Faré
>> had forgotten....

No, I thought that you of all people knew that *this* issue with D-D-O
had been fixed, since it was fixed in part in response to your
legitimate complaints, and you were maintainer, and I had discussed
the topic on the mailing-list. I thought you were complaining about
the many *remaining* issues, of which there are many.

But, yeah, D-D-O has been usable since 2.29 in February 2013, before
the official 3.0.1 release of ASDF 3.

As for my point 3, it addressed using prefix as a namespace strategy,
to avoid strings and use symbols or keywords. I believe this is a good
enough strategy, at least for widely used free software libraries,
like CFFI. If somehow you have large proprietary ASDF extensions, you
might want to stick to using strings that include package prefixes.


>:Stelian

> I think that there are sometimes misunderstandings on mailing lists and probably the best way to avoid them is to have better documentation. Faré :) ?
> Also, maybe I'll get to blogging about best practices in writing ASDF extensions.

I obviously haven't been very good at documenting all the code I
wrote. They say writing the docs is twice as long and hard as writing
the code; I admit I didn't have the time and energy to write the docs
for all the code I wrote, fixed, or rewrote. It wasn't motivating that
nobody seemed to be listening anyway, beyond the very basics (and even
there).

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all,
but goes on making his own business better all the time. — Henry Ford