Actually, a quick aside: gather-operation is an unpleasing name, since most of our other operation subclasses are named foo-op.

Is there some way to make gather-op a new name, while keeping gather-operation as a (deprecated) alias for the class? Ideally permitting users' method dispatch and make-instance usage to continue to function?

In the best of all worlds, I would like to make that name change, and then export gather-op (and only gather-op).

On 4 Aug 2020, at 16:35, Robert Goldman wrote:

On 4 Aug 2020, at 16:18, Ilya Perminov wrote:

The around method will look something like this

(defmethod input-files :around ((o asdf/bundle::gather-operation) (c system))
  (unless (eq (asdf/bundle::bundle-type o) :no-output-file)
    (append (call-next-method)
            (remove-if-not
                (asdf/bundle::pathname-type-equal-function
                     (asdf/bundle::bundle-pathname-type (asdf/bundle::gather-type o)))
                           (mappend (lambda (c) (output-files 'process-op c))
                                    (asdf/component:sub-components c  :type 'wrapper-file))))))

To my taste it knows too much about ASDF guts, but maybe it is not too bad.

I'm looking at the code now, and

• bundle-type is exported from asdf/bundle (but not asdf) (it could use a docstring if you can propose one)

• So is bundle-pathname-type

• pathname-type-equal-function is not exported, but it's a trivial combination of pathname-type and equalp

• gather-type is the only "really internal" function. (A block comment would be nice here, too.)

• gather-operation is not exported, but I think that's probably wrong on our part: I don't believe there should be hidden operations. If I get around to it, I will probably export it from the asdf (really asdf/interface) package, unless someone has a good argument for it continuing to be internal.

So I don't think that is a lot of ASDF internals, especially not for customizing the ASDF protocol.