WARNING: System definition file ...

[Faré]

On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 9:14 PM, Stas Boukarev <stassats at gmail.com> wrote:
> 3.3.0 issues a barrage of new warnings about something it has decided is
> uncouth now.
>
On what systems is it issuing warnings? Any free software that we can patch?

Without specific warnings coming from specific libraries, it's hard to
tell what can be fixed, what cannot, what is an actual problem with
the code you're using, what is possibly a problem about ASDF itself,
etc.

Odds are, the something had been decided as uncouth long ago, and ASDF
just lacked the means to warn you about it.

> I really have no wish to stare at these warnings coming from third party
> libraries, especially since they're never going to be fixed.
> Is the old behavior posing problems? Is the old behavior going away soon?
>
Yes, some old behavior is posing problem and has for years. Sometimes
the old behavior has already gone away and/or is precariously emulated
in slightly incompatible ways using the newer better interface.
Sometimes we really want to get away from a really bad interface that
has been deprecated for years (e.g. run-shell-command, which is a
security liability in addition to been challenged with usability).
Sometimes a recent refactoring made some operation non-sensical (e.g.
operation-on-warnings) and/or not so useful (e.g. require-system), or
a really bad interface to the system (system-registered-p).

Depending on the interfaces, the old behavior may go away within two
year, especially where supporting it is problematic and/or the
interface is bogus and misleading and not properly doing what it was
once advertised to be used for. Well, whoever is maintainer then will
probably do something conservative that preserves compatibility (with
some kind of warning) wherever it isn't an encouragement to writing
nonsensical code.

> This is why I don't update ASDF, I don't want to change anything in my code
> because of a new version.

Last I heard, janderson was using his own slightly forked ASDF 1, and
some russians had forked ASDF 2.

On the other hand, some programs depend on a recent ASDF, such as
IOlib or CFFI, or scripts that depend on a fixes run-program or on its
younger sibling launch-program, especially so on SBCL/Windows.

There is no pleasing everyone, but there's going forward. SBCL also
sometimes deprecates some old interfaces, and issues warnings to those
who use them.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Every four seconds a woman has a baby.
Our problem is to find this woman and stop her.