On Tue, 2012-04-10 at 01:37 +1000, Douglas Crosher wrote: [...]
Won't library authors need to wait until their user base has upgraded ASDF before they can start migrating to UTF-8? The external-format support helps write portable libraries using non-ASCII characters and is only available after an upgrade. [...]
* thus, library developers can do nothing but wait for EVERYONE to be using a recent ASDF before they can do anything.
As a library writer, I treat ASDF as any other dependency: if I think that I like/need some new ASDF feature I just use it; if users don't want to or can't upgrade, that's not my problem [...]
Admittedly, in either case, library developers could use such conditional reading as in #+asdf-unicode #:asdf-unicode :encoding :utf-8 or #+asdf-unicode :encoding #:asdf-unicode :latin1 to make their libraries safer in a backwards-compatible way.
It would be great if some suggestions like this could be offered to ease the transition.
There may be a concern that their users would have to upgrade ASDF now.
How can everyone enjoy reliable non-ASCII today, without the user base having upgraded ASDF?
Not possible. Even then "#+asdf-unicode" solution would only preserve backwards-compatibility at the cost of no providing "reliable non-ASCII" -- Stelian Ionescu a.k.a. fe[nl]ix Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur. http://common-lisp.net/project/iolib