On 18 March 2010 16:41, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll <juanjose.garciarip...@googlemail.com> wrote: > This is an idea that has been long floating in the back of my mind, and was > brought back to life by these comments > http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/f99a69797eda1caf > > The problem is that many people use *.asd files to do things like building > up packages, creating operations, defining methods, etc. That makes it > impossible to ship those libraries because the side effects are not recorded > in the system itself. So if ECL traverses the system to build a standalone > program it will know which sources are required, but those sources may for > instance rely on a package that was created in the *.asd definition. > > My suggestion is a gradual move towards enforcing that *.asd files become > mere descriptions of the system and that side effects needed for building > and loading are listed in the system itself. > What about instead investing in XCVB?
Such enforcement will necessarily introduce backward incompatibility and pain, which I think goes contrary to the goals of ASDF. XCVB, on the other hand, is designed to pretty much do what you ask for: have system descriptions be pure information manipulated by an external process without uncontrolled side-effects. As to systems that currently use weird ASDF extensions, you could either make XCVB's ASDF converter better, or just convert these systems by hand. [ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ] The World owes you nothing. You owe everything to yourself. _______________________________________________ asdf-devel mailing list asdf-devel@common-lisp.net http://common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/asdf-devel
