On Sun, Sep 15, 2024 at 6:30 PM Robert P. Goldman <rpgold...@sift.net> wrote:
> As far as I can tell, the current behavior is buggy, because it implies that > ASDF will behave differently when the user chooses to use logical pathnames > versus when they don’t. That’s not a Good Thing. That’s bad. Well, all right. You go ahead and fix it, since it's your project and you call the shots. But I will shed a few tears for humanity, and kick myself a couple of times for bringing to your attention this non-problem not in need of a solution. How many complaints have you received from people using logical pathnames about the current behavior of ASDF? Unless something has escaped my attention, that number is exactly zero, so I can pretty confidently say that in a concrete sense, you're not going to make anyone happy. > If I was to alter the documentation to reflect this behavior, I would be > describing something that is a bug as if it was a feature, and worse, would > be committing ASDF to maintain this undesirable inconsistency going forward. You could, of course, just dump the stuff about logical pathnames. I've yet to encounter anybody ever suggesting that they are a good idea, except for that one guy who was talking about how easy it is to use them solely for the purpose of being an obnoxious prat. This whole episode is a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. The very presence of logical pathnames in the Common Lisp spec is an example of it, too -- some faction pushed it in late in the game (as it suited their commercial systems that were obsolete even before ANSI Common Lisp was adopted), and now, like the mariner with his albatross, we're saddled with it for eternity. Yikes. Robert
