[cffi-devel] uffi.asd vs uffi-compat.asd

[dherring at tentpost.com]

Luís Oliveira wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 4:01 PM, Jeff Cunningham
> <j.k.cunningham at comcast.net> wrote:
>> I just tried to install elephant and ran into an annoying problem which
>> could only be resolved by renaming the cffi/uffi-compat/uffi.asd to
>> uffi-compat.asd. The problem seems to be one of identity theft, since
>> elephant uses uffi, and it was picking up the cffi compatibility code
>> (which does not appear to be sufficiently compatible for elephant),
>> instead of what it expected.
>
> Elephant breaks UFFI's abstractions and assumes SB-ALIEN is being used
> behind the scenes. That naturally breaks with cffi-uffi-compat.

This looks to me like an Elephant error triggering an obscure asdf
configuration error.  Ideally, Elephant should be fixed to properly use
UFFI, and the configuration error should be hunted down.

I'm unclear about why asdf finds cffi/uffi-compat/uffi.asd before
uffi.asd.  If this is a stock part of clbuild, then Jeff should report
this problem to them; the clbuild team can decide how they want to solve
it.  If this was caused by a custom asdf recursive-directory-search in
Jeff's init files, then he should fix it there (breadth-first instead of
depth-first traversal).


> CFFI's uffi.asd is just a convenient way of using cffi-uffi-compat
> without editing third-party systems and I didn't expect it to be
> picked up automatically by tools such as clbuild.
>
> I would gladly rename it.

I don't think CFFI should change anything.  Its perfectly normal for an
upgrade/compatibility layer to reuse the original name.  For example, my
computer has /usr/bin/cc symlinked to gcc; I don't know anyone who uses
the original cc.

- Daniel