sorry Stas, but i just had to dishonestly (?) cut your mail... :) with
the hope that it will incite some reflection:


> I specifically don't update cl-ppcre.asd [...]
>
> [...] and all the users can do is just to suck it up.


FTR, there's an open PR with discussion:
https://github.com/edicl/cl-ppcre/pull/30

i understand that "it was him who made the first change!", and
"everything would still be fine if he doesn't make a change!"... but
i'm not sure it's reasonable to expect this kind of conservatism in a
collaborative space. old ASDF was a piece of software that wasn't
designed for the tasks it is used for today (as in its API, let alone
its implementation), and that was causing a lot of headache to "the
users" you seem to be defending above.

i don't have a strong opinion about this specific warning. to be
honest, if i was the ASDF maintainer, it would be fine for me if the
warning was off by default, and i would only turn it on in my own CI
to send out the PR's and/or warnings to the relevant maintainers, and
then let old and/or conservative libs continue to misbehave as they
did with the old ASDF.

but it's quite disheartening to see all the trash-talk against the
refactored ASDF. i may be just one user, but the cleanup of ASDF
helped me tremendously! maybe i was using more deps than usual (~100),
and had to deal with live systems and whatnot that most CL users don't
do...? but prior to the ASDF cleanup i had wasted countless hours
hunting build-related bugs only to realize that there wasn't any bug
(in my code), and by getting used to mindlessly rebuilding from
scratch *any time* something strange happened.

conservatism, and the general hostility, has always troubled me in the
CL community, but i don't have a dog in this fight currently, or maybe
even anymore, so i better cut the talk...