On 16 Jan 2018, at 14:17, Faré wrote:

:Robert
In that case, it seems to me that
check-not-old-asdf-system may be simply inappropriate as a check in some
(all?) bundle operations. But I would be hard pressed to say when it is and
is not appropriate. E.g., presumably it is appropriate in image building,
since any image one builds would include the current running ASDF. But that
argument does not seem to hold for bundles full of fasls or source code,
does it?

Well, since at least on most implementations, building the fasls
involve loading the code in the current image, there isn't much leeway
by which asdf could afford not to use the same
check-not-old-asdf-system function. A future version of ASDF that
seriously supports cross-compilation might, but we're not quite there
yet (see the TODO for hints, if you're interested in making it
happen).

Am I correct in thinking that Dave's way of building monolithic bundles of either fasls or source code are, at least potentially, a baby version of cross-compilation? It seems like these are interesting specifically because they could be loaded into different images (otherwise, it's not clear to me why it would be better to build a monolithic FASL than just build an image).

In that case, since this would effectively be cross-compilation (albeit a trivial case of it), it's not surprising that the logic for dealing with built-in dependencies like ASDF can go awry.

In which case delivering with Docker might be the better approach! ;-)

Best,
r