Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll wrote:
Now that this discussion is opened, I would like to add a small question and a petition.
First the question. What is the level of integration of ASDF with different implementations? Does ASDF support all lisp implementations equally? Does SBCL (and perhaps other) ship the latest versions of ASDF?
This is a good question. Do we have a notion of an ASDF release from git that is flagged as worth packaging into an implementation?
I'm thinking that, for example, it's a good idea for us to be able to push releases like 1.359 and 1.360 that people can try out and load on their own.
But I'd argue that we should additionally take some action (I'm not sure what this would be or how to manage it) to "bless" a release as being stable enough for implementation maintainers to adopt.
At the very least, we might want to buff the tests, and have some page where people could report testing ASDF on different implementation X OS X architecture tuples.
Also, would it be worth tweaking the version numbering scheme to provide information about the nature of the changes (as, e.g., ASDF itself suggests).
For example, if we were at 1.0.359, my doc string patch, because it wouldn't change the API or behavior, would just push us to 1.0.360.
The proposed test-op modification so that test-op is made to depend by default on load-op would change behavior but not the API. So this should push us from 1.0.359 to 1.1.0. [Previously, test-op had no default dependencies, and everyone wanting to implement it had to add a :depends-on (:test-op (:load-op "foo")) to his/her foo system.]
Finally, if we were to change the API incompatibly, that should bump us from 1.0.359 to 2.0.0.
[While this seems crispy and clear, I suspect that in practice "change the API incompatibly" is not sufficiently operational that one could take a look at a change and decide unambiguously if it was an incompatible API modification.]
The ASDF development community has a higher duty to its users than developers of a less pervasive library, so it's probably worth thinking about this a little to get it right.
Best, Robert