why does ASDF ask to please only define system/test?

[Stas Boukarev]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 2:05 AM Attila Lendvai <attila at lendvai.name> wrote:

> sorry Stas, but i just had to dishonestly (?) cut your mail... :) with
> the hope that it will incite some reflection:
>
>
> > I specifically don't update cl-ppcre.asd [...]
> >
> > [...] and all the users can do is just to suck it up.
>
>
> FTR, there's an open PR with discussion:
> https://github.com/edicl/cl-ppcre/pull/30
>
> i understand that "it was him who made the first change!", and
> "everything would still be fine if he doesn't make a change!"... but
> i'm not sure it's reasonable to expect this kind of conservatism in a
> collaborative space. old ASDF was a piece of software that wasn't
> designed for the tasks it is used for today (as in its API, let alone
> its implementation), and that was causing a lot of headache to "the
> users" you seem to be defending above.
>
> i don't have a strong opinion about this specific warning. to be
> honest, if i was the ASDF maintainer, it would be fine for me if the
> warning was off by default, and i would only turn it on in my own CI
> to send out the PR's and/or warnings to the relevant maintainers, and
> then let old and/or conservative libs continue to misbehave as they
> did with the old ASDF.
>
> but it's quite disheartening to see all the trash-talk against the
> refactored ASDF. i may be just one user, but the cleanup of ASDF
> helped me tremendously! maybe i was using more deps than usual (~100),
> and had to deal with live systems and whatnot that most CL users don't
> do...? but prior to the ASDF cleanup i had wasted countless hours
> hunting build-related bugs only to realize that there wasn't any bug
> (in my code), and by getting used to mindlessly rebuilding from
> scratch *any time* something strange happened.
>
> conservatism, and the general hostility, has always troubled me in the
> CL community, but i don't have a dog in this fight currently, or maybe
> even anymore, so i better cut the talk...
>
There's not even any conservatism here. Nothing in the behavior has changed
for better or worse (at least in the scope of cl-ppcre.asd), the only
adverse effect is the warning. I apply that PR, and asdf:test-system still
works exactly the same, as far as I can tell.
I'm not against the cl-ppcre/test thingy, just the warning for
cl-ppcre-test.
What happens when I update cl-ppcre.asd and other libraries? Now I get five
and not ten things warning me about a non-issue. So my only course of
action to get to zero warnings is to actually have as many warnings as
possible so that other people start complaining, and not to barge in to
working for years projects and demand for new maintainers "cause I did a
thing".
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