: Xach
: Faré
: Xach
I request a slot called "properties" that can hold arbitrary key/value data.
If it's arbitrary, it's not usable from one system to the other, and thus serves no purpose.
I don't understand this, sorry.
Imagine that there was a community desire to provide, in a system, the answer to the question "Where is the best place to go to report bugs for this system?"
Doesn't require a lot of imagination. Then we add a new slot for that.
It is possible, today, to choose a key (or set of keys) for a property stored in the system, and for authors who wish to participate to adopt the convention, and for some tool to gather this information and provide it in a useful way.
There's already a perfectly fine feature for free-form metadata that follows loose conventions impossible to process automatically. It's called comments.
Contrariwise, class slots are supposed to hold information suitable for automation following sufficiently agreed-upon protocols.
I don't see how this is not usable from one system to another.
Different names for the same thing, or same name for different things. Automation is hell if possible at all. A disservice to the community.
It does not require reader conditionalization, subclassing, or ASDF upgrades. It can be expanded and changed without expansions or changes to ASDF. It works with past versions of ASDF, present versions of ASDF, and until today, I thought it would work in future versions of ASDF.
It still requires agreement to an actual specified protocol to be useful, but it creates the false sense that cooperation is possible without such. Out of the existing uses of :properties, the only properties that are usable by more than one system are the albert things. Interestingly, they are not a protocol allowing for multiple software to cooperate, but only the internals of a single system, and would be better served by an albert-system subclass of system.
None of these properties otherwise "works" in any meaningful way as a convention followed by multiple parties. Remarkably, automation still requires software to be written, and does not retroactively happen in old versions of the software.
I'm not sure why this is an undesirable feature that must be removed from ASDF.
I don't see any feature being removed. I see features being added, and a bug being removed that lures developers into believing they are cooperating with others when actually they aren't.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. — Thoreau