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

[Luís Oliveira]

On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Jeff Cunningham
<j.k.cunningham at comcast.net> wrote:
> As it stands, even using asdf:*central-registry* is a problem, because
> there's no way to use both. Since they both have the same name only one can
> exist with it using the asdf system in any normal fashion.

That of course is a more general problem that should be solved with
something like this: <http://paste.lisp.org/display/45282>.

I have seen plenty of people taking advantage of the fact that
CFFI-UFFI-COMPAT can easily be used as a drop-in replacement for UFFI.
I have never seen anyone trying to use CFFI-UFFI-COMPAT and UFFI
simultaneously and I strongly suspect you don't actually have that
need either.

If for some reason you do need that, it's fairly straightforward to
use RENAME-PACKAGE to remove CFFI-UFFI-COMPAT's UFFI nickname.


> Both UFFI and CFFI have a right to exist. The gcc analogy isn't valid -
> these aren't compilers that users expect to be substituting one for another.
> It doesn't matter that the CFFI people don't like the style of code writing
> that goes on in the ELEPHANT group.

By "the CFFI people" I presume you mean me, since the other CFFI
developers haven't joined the discussion. I never said I didn't their
code style.


> They chose to use UFFI for whatever
> reason and should have the right to expect that some other development group
> won't break their code via the ASDF package system unless there is a
> dependency relationship.

How are we breaking their code? Just don't use CFFI-UFFI-COMPAT. If I
just rename the system, Elephant/clbuild won't work either. That was
my first concern.


> Since UFFI came up with the name first, I believe most people would agree
> they have a prior right to the name.

Nobody is arguing that.


> I think you should change the name of your file to uffi-cffi-compat.asd

Like I said, I have no problem with that and I agree that it's the
best way in principle.  However, I have a couple of concerns that I've
mentioned in my previous email which you decided to ignore and instead
paint this as some personal conflict between the UFFI and CFFI
developers. That was unfortunate.


> Then, inform your users of the fact, and if they were relying on an implicit
> use of CFFI in place of UFFI they should change their projects to explicitly
> use CFFI by way of this definition file.

Not sure if this is what you mean, but some projects do indeed already
use cffi-uffi-compat explicitly (e.g., Edi Weitz's CL-GD uses it in
order to support CLISP.) but others don't, namely CL-SQL.

Bottom line is, if I rename CFFI's uffi.asd, it'll just break a bunch
stuff within clbuild and Elephant still won't work out of the box. I
don't see how that could be regarded as an improvement.

I would be glad to work with you to solve the problem, but renaming
uffi.asd is clearly not the first step.

Cheers,

-- 
Luís Oliveira
http://student.dei.uc.pt/~lmoliv/