[asdf-install-devel] Patches, Darcs, 'n' stuff

[Gary King]

Hi Dan,

(I'm cc'ing Attila because he has much more darcs foo than I do, see  
the last paragraph...).

It sounds like you're having fun and making progress!

> Cool. I debugged a number of problems with the help of the unit
> tests. In fact, when I have time to unravel it from my other local
> changes, I may have a patch for Windows/Lispworks to fix argument
> quoting for the tar command (actually making quoting unnecessary).
>
> It looks like test TEST-1 of test suite SPACE-IN-WORKING-DIRECTORY is
> rarely going to succeed on Windows, because its success criterion is
> that the symlink file is created.

Ah, good point!

> ... since ASDF
> has persistent state about what systems are defined and where they are
> -- I suppose it's possible for it to load a system from someplace
> other than the test's installation location. Not sure how to address
> that without reaching into ASDF's internals.

This is easy to do by manipulated ASDF's notion of where to find  
systems (though it's tricky to do because you need to make sure that  
ASDF can still find all the other systems...). Hmmm.

> An ASDF:UNREGISTER-SYTEM
> would be welcome, similar to MK-DEFSYSTEM's.
>
> The only other test that's failing for me now is TEST-1 of
> DIRECT-INSTALL. Haven't started debugging that one yet.

In case you don't already know, the problem is that the install  
command returns the name of the package installed and then tries to  
load that. In the usual case, the name is the name of the system;  
with the direct case, the name is the pathname / URL used and ASDF  
doesn't know how to install that.

> I'm running these tests using my earlier patch for tar extraction,
> with the alternative extractor in place.

Great.

> Now that I know more, I agree even more with Andy's desire to have
> integral gzip/tar extraction.

I agree.

> I could publish my darcs repository so people could pull some of this
> stuff directly for experimentation. Any interest? That would take me a
> while to set up, so I won't bother if I nobody else is really working
> on ASDF-INSTALL and using darcs.

I think that It should be possible to include your patches in the  
darcs repository without making them the tip. If we can figure out  
the syntax so that folks who grab ASDF-Install will get the "plain"   
version while folks who want it can get it the cutting edge version,  
them I'm happy to host your changes (Attila, do you know the  
mechanics for doing this?). I'm also happy to link to your repo. Just  
let me know.
--
Gary Warren King, metabang.com
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Fax: (206) 338-4052
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