The latest version of ASDF contains three functions:
SYSTEM-DEFSYSTEM-DEPENDS-ON SYSTEM-DEPENDS-ON and SYSTEM-WEAKLY-DEPENDS-ON
that return information about defined systems. The intention is to support introspection about sets of systems (I believe Quicklisp does this today).
Currently, ASDF does *not* put the return values into canonical form. So, equivalent forms like
:depends-on (foo) and :depends-on ("foo")
will yield different return values.
Similarly, :version specifications will not be resolved.
This seems wrong to me. I feel that the return values should be canonicalized. So all system names should be resolved down to lower-cased strings.
Does that sound like the right approach? It would support performing inference on the systems relatively straightforwardly. I can't imagine why people would want the exact, literal slot initforms, but I could be wrong.
R