On 16 Jan 2018, at 10:46, Sam Steingold wrote:
Hi,
When I start CLISP with the full linking set (i.e., including all
possible extensions), I have 63 packages in (list-all-packages), and
37
of them (more than half!) comes from asdf (22 ASDF/* and 15 UIOP/*).
I wonder if I am the only one unhappy about this.
In particular, has it ever been considered that it might be a good
idea
to limit the number of packages asdf creates?
The large number of packages was the outcome of the restructuring of
ASDF in terms of package inferred systems.
Arguably this provides a better way of automatically identifying the
dependencies in a complex system like ASDF.
This is not a style of programming that I follow, myself, but it
certainly seems like a reasonable design decision.
Undoing this would, I believe, be a monumental amount of work, and would
also lead to a constant need to maintain complicated dependencies by
hand. These dependencies potentially change whenever we discover that
one file/package needs another's capabilities. With package-inferred
system construction, we don't have to wrangle ASDF dependencies to keep
the system building successfully.
To be quite honest, I can't imagine a world in which there is so much
labor available to ASDF that such fundamentally aesthetic considerations
would rise to the top of anyone's priority list of ASDF tasks.
Sorry,
r
