Hi Mark,

Thanks for your response. Running LISP-IMPLEMENTATION-VERSION from within the GAE development server gives:

  1.3.3
  Java_HotSpot(TM)_64-Bit_Server_VM-Oracle_Corporation-1.7.0_60-b19
  x86_64-Mac_OS_X-10.9.5

It sounds like getting ASDF working is going to be more of a can of worms than simply fixing my ASDF configuration. It's not crucial to my project and I know you're busy, so perhaps we should just create an issue for anything PATHNAME-related that might need looking at and then come back to it at some point in the future? I'll just unpack my JAR file and load the FASLs directly in the meantime.

Thanks again,

John :^P (flying like an eagle to the sea)

On 15 December 2015 at 20:11, Mark Evenson <evenson@panix.com> wrote:


On 2015/12/14 23:39, John Pallister wrote:
[…]
> That is, merging a relative path with the (absolute) JFAD path retained the
> default JAR file "device" (and remains a relative path, which ASDF won't
> accept), but merging an absolute path reset the device component. I've read
> through the documentation for MERGE-PATHNAMES in the HyperSpec[2] and
> AFAICT the device component should be copied across. I'm reasonably
> confident that if it were, things would work better. But I could be
> (doubly) wrong.
>
> I am trying to figure this out for myself, but I'm stuck for now, so I'm
> hoping someone (i.e. Mark) can, on reading this, offer some guidance as to
> where I should go from here. I haven't (yet) tried posting to the ASDF
> mailing list as this seems like a fairly ABCL-specific issue.
>
[…]
You are probably being bit here by the shenanigans noted in section
1.1.1 entitled "ANSI Common Lisp" of the [User Manual][1]:

[…]

When merging pathnames and the defaults point to a EXT:JAR-PATHNAME, we
set the DEVICE of the result to :UNSPECIFIC if the pathname to be be
merged does not contain a specified DEVICE, does not contain a specified
HOST, does contain a relative DIRECTORY, and we are not running on a
MSFT Windows platform.

[…]

[Footnote] The intent of this rather arcane sounding deviation from
conformance is so that the result of a merge won’t fill in a DEVICE with
the wrong ”default device for the host” in the sense of the fourth
paragraph in the CLHS description of MERGE-PATHNAMES (see in [P+96] the
paragraph beginning ”If the PATHNAME explicitly specifies a host and not
a device”). A future version of the implementation may return to
conformance by using the HOST value to reflect the type explicitly.

[…]

[1]: http://abcl.org/releases/1.3.3/abcl-1.3.3.pdf

If desired, one can study the current aim of the implementation in using
the DEVICE field to represent a JAR file via the [url-pathname][2] and
[jar-pathname][3] design notes.  More history can be gleaned with the
[notes on the last time I mucked with MERGE-PATHNAMES][4].

[2]:
http://abcl.org/trac/browser/trunk/abcl/doc/design/pathnames/url-pathnames.markdown
[3]:
http://abcl.org/trac/browser/trunk/abcl/doc/design/pathnames/jar-pathnames.markdown
[4]:
http://abcl.org/trac/browser/trunk/abcl/doc/design/pathnames/merging-defaults.markdown

Could you provide the values for LISP-IMPLEMENTATION-VERSION executed on
your GAE container?

I need more time to analyze what the right way forward would be if we
need to fix the MERGE-PATHNAME semantics, as I need to preserve a whole
lot of edge cases for which I don't have time to develop reliable tests.

Time.  Slipping like a river, into the future.


--
"A screaming comes across the sky.  It has happened before, but there
is nothing to compare to it now."