On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 11:47 PM, Faré fahree@gmail.com wrote:
Dear Robert,
I pushed my changes to your build-op branch. Easier than mailing patches.
Well, ASDF itself has long been described as a build system or build tool (including in our ILC 2010 article), just like make, ant, etc. See also Wikipedia pages for each of these. What do these programs do? They build. I don't love the word, but I don't know a better one.
I get it, but now ASDF does more than one kind of build, including some things (with the bundle-op) that look a lot more like what 'make' does than what ASDF has done up to now.
Indeed. On the other hand, you just acknowledged that all these things are a kind of "build".
Up to now, there's been no real need to distinguish between "build" and "load", but now there are things that look like a conventional C program build, rather than like what DEFSYSTEM did before.
Hence my recommending making load-system not the main interface anymore, but build. Loading is just the common case for CL systems.
Let's not rush into this: as Attila has pointed out, whatever we choose, we'll have to live with for a long while.
There's no rush, but I'd really like it as part of ASDF 3.1.1, and I'm really hoping for a release this month.
Unfortunately, I think both DO and LOAD are non-starters because of the pain they would impose on anyone who wants to USE-PACKAGE ASDF.
Of course, I only suggested the former as a joke. Although UIOP provides the :MIX option to DEFINE-PACKAGE that nicely deals with all these conflicts.
What about something bland like "start"? Or we could get all Star Trek and use "make it so" ;-)
I think this is even more misleading than "build". It feels like you are starting a program. "make" could do it.
Note that if we rename it make, it would also be nice to rename build-op to make-op before anyone uses it. We should also rename :build-operation to :make-operation or :make-op or :make, and just have some #-asdf3.1 in asdf.asd to cope with upgrade from the one and only current client of it, i.e. current versions of asdf3.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org Mathematicians are like lovers. Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this consequence another. — Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle