On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 4:15 PM, Robert Goldman <rpgoldman@sift.info> wrote:

I think that this change may be annoying to Unix[1] *users* who start up
their lisp from the shell, and who have expectations about how their
lisp implementation is going to set the *default-pathname-defaults* from
the current working directory.

This change would not break any systems, but it would break some users'
conventional usage patterns. I don't see that any benefit is provided
that would compensate for that. And I don't see that there is a
problem: this only kicks in when people have failed to provide a usable
path to their systems. For some people, with some usage patterns and
some choice of implementation, the current behavior will provide a
desirable outcome. For others, they are no worse off (so ASDF looks
someplace stupid where there will be no .asd files, consuming some
minimal amount of cycles in an error case).

Furthermore, vendors/implementors for whom *default-pathname-defaults*
will not be usefully set, may feel free to define appropriate behaviors.

So I'm not convinced that ASDF is broke, and request that we not fix it.

Best,
r

[1] by this I mean the broadest sense of the word, to cover Linux, the
BSD family, and Mac OS X.

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I'm not arguing that ASDF is broken, rather that the default behavior is not explicitly defined. The benefit I envision is defined behavior versus implementation dependent behavior. I acknowledge that the benefit may not justify the change. If the concern is for users that rely on *DEFAULT-PATHNAME-DEFAULTS*, though, I think the internals can be modified to result in defined behavior while still respecting the value of *DEFAULT-PATHNAME-DEFAULTS* when it is defined. I think the change can be made in a way that is transparent to the users.

I don't really think of this as a bug and probably should have brought it up here before entering it in launchpad. I'm really just interested in bringing it up to discuss and getting feedback. I have a local git branch of ASDF that I work from and will develop my ideas there. I installed VirtualBox and will work on testing it on Linux as well.