: Dave Cooper
: Robert Goldman rpgoldman@sift.info
Summarizing: * gendl (and gdl with it) uses monolithic-compile-bundle-op, depends-on uiop, not asdf. * gendl tries to use uiop from source to include it without asdf, but asdf 3.3 broke that.
My understanding of the reason for this breakage is as follows: * to ensure safe upgrade, asdf specially loads itself as the start of any call to operate (otherwise, a dependency on asdf could cause an upgrade in the middle, which would totally break everything.) To prevent catastrophic downgrade, asdf specially ignores asdf.asd unless its version is at least as recent as the current one. * asdf has a special relationship to uiop, because it kind of depends on uiop, but at least since 3.3.0, asdf.asd couldn't depend on uiop.asd because the above rule could then cause circular dependencies. asdf.asd instead has a magic asdf/driver system that magically mimic what is in uiop.asd. * To prevent potentially conflicting redefinition within the same build, asdf 3.3 therefore specially ignores uiop.asd unless its version is *strictly* superior to what is built into asdf.
Therefore, if you want to force asdf 3.3.x to load uiop, I recommend patching uiop/version.lisp to append appending .0.1 to the *uiop-version* variable value.
Sorry for the complication, but that's the simplest I could come up with. If you can think of a better arrangement, I'm sure the next ASDF powers that be will be listening to you.
I recommend against changing the logic of ASDF.
Question: Is there a supported way to do what I'm trying to do, without modifying the ASDF source code? Intuitively, it seems to me that we should be able to include uiop in build products using monolithic-compile-bundle-op, without including asdf.
I would say that gendl is large enough that the 6000 lines of asdf minus uiop shouldn't be a big burden; but if you insist on shipping with uiop and not asdf, I recommend bumping oh-so-slightly the version of uiop.
: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).
In one sense at least, Faré is right that I should be replaced as maintainer. I have never used any of the bundle operations, and feel ambivalent about their inclusion into ASDF. They crept in as a side-effect of supporting lisps that use the C compiler, but they are a substantial increase in the breadth and maintenance difficulty of ASDF. I'm afraid I have neither the time nor the interest to carry that burden. I would be happy to yield it to others.
There certainly was a mission creep in ASDF 3 (see my 2014 article for some explanations). I don't regret making it happen, even though bugfixing lasted until 2017. The code should be pretty stable now — though, who knows for sure?
Whatever I or other people wish, whoever it is who does the grunt work that others won't do shan't be blamed by those who are not willing to do (or fund) said grunt work.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org If normative judgments cannot be rational, then science is actually useless. — François Guillaumat