Problems with DEFSYSTEM-DEPENDS-ON

[Faré]

On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 12:22 PM, Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info> wrote:
> On 9 Apr 2018, at 11:17, Attila Lendvai wrote:
>
>>> A cheesy fix would simply be to wrap it in IGNORE-ERRORS. But it might
>>> cause
>>> errors in its present form.
>>
>>
>>
>> i've learned, painfully, that indiscriminate ignore-errors will almost
>> always bite you back (in the form of wasted debugging time), no matter
>> how innocent they look.
>>
>>
>>> This really is more a QL issue than an ASDF one (although it illustrates
>>> an
>>> issue with wrapping errors, IMO).
>>
>> while this is true, the implementation of QL requires a reliable way
>> to hook into the internal state of various versions of ASDF (namely,
>> into the situation when ASDF is looking for a system, and not finding
>> it will lead to an error without QL intervention). if i understand it
>> correctly, this is the crux of this issue.
>
> Sure, and I am happy to try to support this, but not to the extent of
> recovering a copy of ASDF 2.x and trying to run it.
>
> The problem is that I don't know when the missing component condition was
> added to ASDF, and doing this right would involve checking the enclosed
> condition to see if it's a missing component error.  I know how to do that
> for a modern ASDF, but I don't know how to handle ASDFs that are too old to
> have this condition class.  And I don't fee like it's my job to think about
> that: I think it's perverse to continue trying to use ASDF 2.
>
ASDF 2.26 is totally unsupported at this point. No implementation uses
anything less than 3.1.2 (the first stable release in the 3.1 series,
from May 2014). Many essential packages require 3.1.x or later. It is
a waste of time to try to get 2.26 running

If Quicklisp wants to be conservative, I would recommend requiring ior
providing ASDF 3.1.7, which is the last in the 3.1 series and pretty
stable, from March 2016, which is two years ago.

The "official" policy of ASDF was always to not support anything that
had already been superseded 2 years ago or more. 3.1.7 should be the
oldest supported ASDF release.

That said, what my opinions seem to be negatively taken into account
by Xach, so there.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Evolution competitively selects stable cooperative patterns.