On 6/28/10 Jun 28 -5:22 PM, Vsevolod Dyomkin wrote:
On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 1:00 AM, Faré <fahree@gmail.com mailto:fahree@gmail.com> wrote:
I propose instead that a completely different API be used, that computes and/or checks a source-registry from some specification and a database of available system versions. i.e. layer something on top of ASDF without modifying anything about ASDF proper.Yes, that is also possible. It's just that currently ASDF has some half-baked version support and it should be either removed completely (deprecated) or improved up to usable state. I mean, that all the versions specified in current defsystem forms are hardly used by any software, that might have wanted to utilize them, and that's because of poor current implementation, I think.
I think it's also because of poor current documentation (and poor documentation reading :->).
Where I work we use :version extensively, and I have discussed this with several people who provide libraries, and encouraged them to comply with the de facto x.y.z versioning standard. The library maintainers have all been very good about adding versioning information, but several have expressed a lack of understanding of how ASDF :version works.
Until recently, you really needed to read the ASDF source to discover how :version worked, and that is, IMO, too high a barrier to put.
Best, r