Dear Lisp hackers,

ASDF 2.30 is another stability release in preparation for ASDF 3. Since 2.29, in addition to specific portability fixes for CCL and CMUCL, it notably restores some backward compatible behavior for syntax tables around loading .asd files, using mutable global tables, instead of standard syntax tables.

Just like 2.29, 2.28 and 2.27 before it, ASDF 2.30 is a pre-release of ASDF 3, an almost complete rewrite of ASDF, and includes a vast number of improvements since ASDF 2.26. http://lists.common-lisp.net/pipermail/asdf-announce/2013-February/000014.ht...

We invite all implementation vendors to update to ASDF 2.30.

We also invite all implementations to make the standard *readtable* and *print-pprint-dispatch* tables immutable, with useful error messages when a modification is attempted. See how the CLHS forbids conformant programs from modifying them: http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/26_glo_s.htm#standard_readtable http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/26_glo_s.htm#standard_pprint_dispatch_table Such modification can only result in problems down the line for users, and it would be nice if at least when SAFETY isn't 0, that were checked. In some unspecified future, we'd like to revert to ASDF 2.29's behavior of binding the syntax tables to their standard values, and then we hope that most implementations will immediately catch misguided attempts by users to modify them (SBCL is the only implementation enforced immutability on both tables).

Many thanks to stassats and avodonosov for their help in testing ASDF and helping make it more robust, more portable and more backward compatible.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended. — F. Bastiat