Dear Greg,

Thanks for the kind words! I am not sure why I didn't see your post on ASDF-devel, but I didn't. And I have seen several requests for moderation, so the list seems live. In case my response is interesting to the group, I am responding to the list as well.

A couple of disclaimers: (1) I haven't used Windows in more than a decade, and (2) I don't use these configuration files. I find I'm happier to keep all of my lisp configuration in lisp configuration files (clinit.cl, .sbclrc, etc. -- indeed I point all of those at one single lisp-config.lisp file), instead of having to hunt through multiple files in multiple locations for this information. So take anything I say with more than a grain of salt (given your cardiologist approves!).

That said, these config files are placed according to the XDG standard which... as far as I can tell only applies to linux, and not to either Windows or MacOS. So there's code in ASDF/UIOP that extends XDG to other platforms. ASDF documentation about XDG can be found here.

I don't understand Windows enough to understand this piece of text from the ASDF manual:

Since support for querying the Windows registry is not possible to do in reasonable amounts of portable Common Lisp code, ASDF 3 relies on the environment variables that Windows usually exports, and are hopefully in synch with the Windows registry. If you care about the details, see uiop/configuration.lisp and don’t hesitate to suggest improvements.

The relevant code may be found in uiop/configuration.lisp. It looks like invoking the functions uiop:xdg-config-home and uiop:xdg-config-pathnames might help you figure out where ASDF is looking. But I don't really understand the discussion about the registry above. I do see a bit of code that says that UIOP (and thus ASDF) look for configs in the value of (uiop:xdg-data-dirs "config/") -- maybe see what that evaluates to on your Windows box?

I hope that these snippets have been helpful, and if you find the answers you seek, please send to me and ASDF-devel, so that the information will be available to others.

It might be a good thing if someone with the resources would gift a Windows resource to the CL Foundation to hook into common-lisp.net so that the community doesn't have to rely on this kind of guesswork. I note that ASDF is no longer tested on Windows at all, since I don't have access to a Windows VM and even if I did, I wouldn't know how to use it (nor do I have the time to learn).

Good luck!
R

On 2 Jun 2023, at 19:40, Greg Bennett wrote:

Good evening Robert,

Some longish time ago you were kind enough to help me with ASDF matters.
I posted recently to asdf-devel, largely in the hope that you might see it, I confess.

Web search has, so far, not been helpful, I'm afraid.

I shall quite understand if you do not reply; your inbox must receive lots of this sort of thing.

I have a test system in c:/ASDF/asdf-tests/ copied from the linux directory /home/gwbennett/ASDF/asdf-tests/

Under Linux in my source-registry.conf.d directory I have the file gb-source.conf
with the one line (:tree "/home/gwbennett/ASDF/asdf-tests/")

Then in sbcl I can issue (asdf:load-system "gb-a") and all is well.

I have tried various spots for gb-source.conf under Windows, all without success:

c:\Users\Greg\AppData\Local\config\common-lisp\source-registry.conf.d\

c:\Users\Greg\

c:\Users\Greg\AppData\

c:\Users\Greg\AppData\Local\

If I issue, old style,  (push "c:/ASDF/asdf-tests/" asdf:*central-registry*) then all is well.

Perhaps there is no place for a config file under W!

Cheers

Greg