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<p dir="auto">On 20 Feb 2019, at 22:14, Faré wrote:</p>
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<div style="white-space:normal"><blockquote style="border-left:2px solid #777; color:#777; margin:0 0 5px; padding-left:5px"><p dir="auto">I've seen the pattern of using<br>
:long-description<br>
#.(uiop:read-file-string<br>
(uiop:subpathname *load-pathname* "README.md"))<br>
spread among CL libraries.<br>
<br>
I see it only as a waste of kilobytes of data (quadrupled on 32-bit<br>
unicode lisps such as SBCL).<br>
<br>
I'm told it's because Quickdocs likes it this way.<br>
<br>
Since there is not (yet?) any type enforcement on the value of that<br>
field, can we instead agree for an alternate format, wherein the field<br>
would instead contain the pathname of the long-description file,<br>
relative to the (asdf:system-source-directory) ? Thus you'd use:<br>
:long-description #p"README.md"<br>
And Quickdocs and other documentation tools would do the right thing from there.</p>
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<p dir="auto">Let me see if I understand clearly:</p>
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<li value="1"><p dir="auto">As before, if you put a string in here, you get the string itself as the value of <code style="background-color:#F7F7F7; border-radius:3px; margin:0; padding:0 0.4em" bgcolor="#F7F7F7">:long-description</code>.</p></li>
<li value="2"><p dir="auto">If there is a pathname literal in here you get the contents of that file as the value of <code style="background-color:#F7F7F7; border-radius:3px; margin:0; padding:0 0.4em" bgcolor="#F7F7F7">:long-description</code>.</p></li>
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<p dir="auto">Is this correct?</p>
<p dir="auto">I'm ok with this, but not so enthusiastic that I'll do it myself. I'd be happy to accept a pull request.</p>
<p dir="auto">I'd also like some discussion about how this change would come into being. It's not especially backward compatible, but it should not cause breakage -- people using older versions of ASDF would just see a pathname in the unlikely event that they tried to retrieve the <code style="background-color:#F7F7F7; border-radius:3px; margin:0; padding:0 0.4em" bgcolor="#F7F7F7">long-description</code>.</p>
<p dir="auto">Can anyone else think of any unexpected consequences?</p>
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